The trial, expected to last around 10 weeks, of six people over allegations of postal vote fraud intended to help the 2005 Conservative general election campaign in Bradford West started yesterday.
Haroon Rashid, the general election candidate, and five others are on trial. A seventh person, the former deputy chairman for finance in the local Conservative association Alyas Khan, has pleaded guilty.
As The Times reports:
Tory activists in a marginal seat hatched a postal ballot fraud in an attempt to rig the voting system at the last general election, a court was told yesterday.
Their “well-organised attempt to subvert the democratic process” involved applications for more than 1,600 postal votes at more than 100 properties – some of them empty and derelict – across Bradford. Many of the would-be voters did not exist, others had no idea that their names were being used and some had their ballot papers redirected to addresses controlled by the conspirators.
You can read the full story here.
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5 Comments
I really do love and hate postal voting at the same time.
It’s so unbelievably convenient, which is great for (generally) law-abiding people like myself and at the same time is a goldmine for those who want to defraud the system.
I see it did them a lot of good in Bradford West lol – they would have gone down not just 5.4% but at least 9%!
This fraud is well known in the community and almost everyone is aware of the truth and knows what has gone on. The worse scenario is that these people get away with this on some kind of technicality or another.
This will be slap in the face of the democratic process.
I was just about to use this in a campaign to students; but unfortunately the Lib Dems were involved in one incident involving 2 votes for, which we apologised for and have not been prosecuted for. 2 to 1600+ to none for Labour means they can continue to be smug about it and maybe even hold the seat.
I wondered what had happened to this.
Haroon Rashid was cleared of all charges after the Judge ruled there was insufficient evidence. The other four face a retrial later this year.
According to: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5762373.ece