Postal Votes are often not real, honest votes

There is an ongoing scandal in British political life. No it’s not the latest Lib Dem sex scandal of which there are many, nor parliamentary expenses nor even MP’s who never turn up to the House of Commons chamber. This scandal is postal voting on demand. Although there are some people, such as those with mobility disabilities who do require postal votes, such a facility should never have been granted to anyone who requested it.

Postal Voting has been implicated in quite a few scandals such as in Tower Hamlets in East London, but this is not the only place where allegations of voter impersonation, fake voters and similar actions have been alleged. Bradford, Calderdale, Derby have all had questionable voters join the voter registration list at the last minute, especially according to some sources in areas that are electorally marginal. The phenomenon of small flats and bedsits containing many more ‘voters’ than the property should contain, as has happened in Tower Hamlets, continues to be a problem, but not one that Labour in the run up to the 2010 election did anything about, probably because it is often the recipient of such bent votes.

An E-Petition has been published on the Government website calling for an end to on demand postal voting and the electoral fraud that it engenders. The petition, which closes in March 2014 is calling for a complete overhaul of the postal voting system to remove the blatant encouragement to defraud that postal voting gives.

The E-Petition can be found here:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/46582

Not only is the facility for people to vote outside the controlled environment of the Pollling Station helping to misrepresent the electorate but is also likely to be used, and has been used, to advance poltiicians who are not interested in representing the electorate as a whole but only to promote sectarian and often anti-democratic interests and agendas.

The guarantee that local and national politicians will be able to count on sheaves of bent votes makes those politicians dependent on those who organise the bent votes, which is not good for democracy. it is also suspected that in many of the Labour ‘one party states’ there is an acceptance of dishonest voting and it is this fraudulent voting which makes it nigh on impossible for voters to remove Labour from their position of dominance. This is because the bent votes will always outweigh the honest ones.

Sign the petition and help make our voting system more transparent and more honest. We are being ill served by postal voting but it is serving those who have anti-democratic aims very well indeed.

This scandal needs to be dealt with before we find ourselves with an ‘elected’ government that bears no resemblement to the actual wishes of the voters.

Links

Daily Mail article from 2010 regarding fraudulent postal votes

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1271457/General-Election-2010-Postal-vote-fraud-amid-fears-bogus-voters-swing-election.html

Allegations of postal vote fraud in Pendle in Lancashire from 2012

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-19397157

Postal vote fraud allegations in Northumberland 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-22330811

Mary Ann Sieghart comments on postal voting fraud in The Independent. Ms Sieghart also details the fact that Asian / Muslim women are frightened of speaking up about the fraudulent voting patterns that diminish and disrupt our democracy.

She said:

”Rachida (not her real name) was playing badminton in a Blackburn sports centre when I asked her if she’d talk to me about politics. I was making a Beyond Westminster programme for Radio 4 about how British Asian voters were deserting the three main parties. This young woman was initially very reluctant to contribute, and when she saw a middle-aged, male Labour councillor from her community trying to eavesdrop, she begged me to send him away.

But once he had gone, she opened up. British Asian politicians in Blackburn (and they’re almost all Labour), she said, had imported practices from Pakistan and India. Some did favours in return for votes. Some were sexist. They didn’t have the interests of the whole community at heart. Worst of all, they put serious pressure on British Asian women to vote for them.”