We told them so - Postal Voting parliamentary inquiry, 2003

The news today that UKIP leader Nigel Farage has written to the Electoral Commission raising questions about the security of postal voting - mentioning the Unions Together organisation we investigated yeaterday - cast my mind back to 2003, when I appeared for UKIP before the ODPM parliamentary committee considering postal voting.

Even then it was clear that there were likely to be problems with postal voting. A representative os the Metropolitan Police's Special Branch stated quite clearly that voting fraud in Asian households was difficult to police for cultural reasons related to patriarchal society, and much discussion centered on the provision of marked voting reigsters so people could check whether their vote had been cast:

Mark Croucher of the UK Independence Party does not believe that provision of a marked register to voters would help detect fraud:

“[…] people who make a conscious decision to abstain and not to vote presumably take sufficient interest in a political process to make those checks, but in terms of finding out on a wider basis you do not remove the element of fraud from it. If people cannot be bothered to vote then they are unlikely to check to see whether they have or not"

 

Appears in the Hansard record of proceedings, as does:

 

 Q326 Chris Mole: Do you believe that having all-postal voting favours one political party over any of the others? Conversely, do you believe not having it favours one party over any others?

    Mr Forse: It probably has an advantage for the larger parties over the smaller parties, but not individual parties.   Mr Croucher: I would concur with that entirely...  it makes it much easier for existing and established parties to turn out people who are members of their parties and to encourage them to vote by post... So, yes, we tend to feel that it is an advantage to the major established parties and a disadvantage to smaller.

Mr Forse was representing the Scottish National Party as I recall. I got rather a hard time of it over Europe from several of the MPs on the panel - the details have not survived to the published version of Hansard! - but finished off by saying

"Attempting to somewhat artificially inflate turn-out by using convenience as a means to twist people's arms into voting is perhaps the wrong approach to it. Perhaps making politics more relevant to the people that we are asking to vote would be the answer. We historically never had a problem."

Naturally, this was not what our elected MPs wanted to hear: one can only guess whether they had already worked out how to subvert the postal voting system before they bothered with the Parliamentary inquiry. UKIPs written submission - which was prepared by former MEP & party chairman Dr John Whittaker - covered almost everything except the prediction of institutionalised corruption of the system by the trades unions in concert with the Labour Party. Fraud in sections of the Asian community was raised by the police, and by the Post Office. Did they pay attention? Of course not.

 

Union postal vote applications go straight onto Labour's computer system

I was taking a look at 'Unions Together' earlier on this morning. In case you weren't aware, that is the operating name of TULO, the Trades Unions and Labour Party Liaison Organisation. They are currently taking part in the Wythenshawe & Sale East by-election despite not being registered with the Electoral Commission, but that is another matter. TULO is located - according to their website - at 1 Brewer's Green, London SW1H 0RH, which is also - coincidentally - the registered address of the Labour Party.

On their website, they feature a section called 'Make your voice heard' to make sure that you are registered to vote, and which allows you to apply for a postal vote. For voter registration, it helpfully encourages people to hold voter registration drives, and supplies materials including voter registration posters in Polish. No, really.

Of more interest is the postal vote application. When you follow the link, it invites you to select your union and download a postal voting form. The unions features are ASLEF, Community, CWU, GMB, TSSA, UCATT, Unison, UNITE and Unity. Clicking on the union link will bring up a pdf document with a postal voting application and a pre-printed address label. All of the forms have the appropriate union's logo displayed in the top right hand corner, but otherwise are pretty standard. Except for one thing. In the bottom left corner is a data protection disclaimer permitting the union to use the details you have supplied to contact you in the future.

So, having filled out the form in blissful ignorance of this, you then send it to the address on the pre-printed reply label:

Nothing particularly controversial there, you might think. Except that if you Google that address, you find that the National Communications Centre is actually the National Communications Centre for the Labour Party.

So what does this mean? It means that every single postal vote gathered by the unions ends up on the database of the Labour Party even before it is submitted to the Electoral Registration Officer in the constituency concerned. As the form also asks for phone numbers and e-mail addresses this is undoubtedly quite useful for another organisation which operates from the same address, the Labour Party Contact Creator software team, which promises:

Of course, they suggest that it will 'allow the Labour Party to meet the challenges of the 21st Century'. Others might suggest that it will 'allow the Labour Party to circumvent the Data Protection Act while breaching the spirit of electoral legislation and the Electoral Commission's guidelines on the handling of postal votes'.

TULO and Unions Together is noted as being promoted by Byron Taylor at the Brewer's Green address above. Byron Taylor is also a Labour councillor and Deputy Leader of the Labour Group on Basildon Council who is 'committed to Basildon' just two years after being Labour's candidate in Stoke on Trent at the general election.

Needless to say, the Unions Together website is hosted - outside the UK, of course! - by Blue State Digital, who are also responsible for Labour's online presence and help Hope not Hate evade VAT, as discussed previously.