Robin Wilton's esoterica

Back on the 'voting' theme again: there's some kind of consternation in wards which experienced a high proportion of postal ballot fraud in the 2004 elections, because this time around the number of applications for postal votes is apparently much-reduced.

At least on the basis of the quotations in this article, I can't say I understand the position of Bridget Prentice, Minister for Constitutional Affairs - though I can't say whether that's because she has a consistent position which has been poorly reported, or an inconsistent position which has been accurately reported...

For instance, talking about compulsory proof of identity - introduced in Northern Ireland as a pre-requisite for adding someone to the voting register - Richard Price QC said it had been 'a complete success'. Mrs Prentice disputed this, saying that voter registration "dropped very markedly after individual registration was brought in and it hasn't really gone back to the same figures again. By implication, it's OK to have bogus electoral registrations, provided they serve to keep the numbers up.

She is also quoted as saying (and again, I have no way of telling whether these were taken out of context) that the new system for postal voting, in which voters have to provide a signature and date of birth, is "as secure as possible". I'm assuming she means 'for a postal voting system based on a register without compulsory individual registration'... otherwise presumably nothing could improve the security of the system.

Mr Price, turning to the subject of electronic voting, noted that in any system where an authentication PIN is posted to voters on the (current) electoral register, anyone in a given household might receive a PIN and use it to cast a vote. However, according to Mrs Prentice,
"because of all the checks and balances that are put into electronic voting that [sic] in some way it is an even more secure system than postal voting". 

I'm sure it is possible for elextronic voting on a mass scale to be more secure than postal voting, but the article doesn't give examples of the kind of checks and balances Mrs Prentice has in mind. Perhaps some kind of premium-rate phone-in system?

At any rate, the pilot projects which reported to the Dept for Constitutional Affairs appear to have specifically avoided electronic or online voting, focussing instead on:

- security and administration
- early voting
- electronic counting
- vote signature checking
- postal vote tracking
- signing for ballot papers

When the time does come for the UK to undertake large-scale electronic voting, its architects could do a lot worse than to learn from the RIES system plemented in Holland - rolled out in 2004 and winner of a 2006 "Best Practices in Innovation" Public Service Award from the UN. The scheme is not without its critics - but the value of prior experience is often as much about what could be improved as about what goes well.

RIES successfully meets these fundamental requirements for a voting system, and does to while allowing voters to cast their votes online via the internet, without changing or adding to their normal home PC set-up: 

"No person should be allowed to vote more than once; the vote should be confidential; each correctly cast vote should be counted; and the voters should be able to trust that their vote is counted."

I'd be happy if our non-electronic polling systems could achieve that. 

Apparently campaigning in the upcoming local elections is 'reaching a climax' today. Could have fooled me. If this is a climax, I've been doing something very wrong for the last few decades.

Here's a quick tally of the campaigning activity visible to our household so far:

OK, those statistics can be a bit confusing, so here's a summary: none, niente, nada, nichevo, zip, zilch. Not a sausage.

The irony is that you've got Blair urging voters to take the polls seriously and not just use them to  give him a farewell 'kicking' at the ballot box, and Brown saying that the polls will be a verdict on all of [them], not just Tony Blair. And yet I've never known a local election in which party political statement of the issues has been so conspicuously lacking. I can't think of any better way to ensure that voters will use their ballot papers in the most superficial way possible.

In this district, I happen to know that one of the biggest local government questions of the decade is currently being considered, and yet none of the parties has put it to voters as an issue at all. There is an angry split between the County Council and the District Councils as to whether the country should cease to have those two levels of local government and move instead to a single unitary authority. It cannot but have a profound effect both on local representation and on local services, and yet apparently it's not worth mentioning to the electorate.

Heaven help them if they start bitching later about 'lack of voter engagement'.

In other election news: Peter Mandelson appears to have taken up a new role at the European Commission, as Commissioner for the Bleedin' Obvious. Looking back on The Blair Years, he sagaciously observes:

"We were perhaps too ready to place emphasis on our management of the media in those early years of government, rather than concentrate on a more policy driven process".

Who says politicians are impervious to criticism?