There have been two further recent reports of police investigations into postal vote allegations:
Police to investigate claims of postal vote fraud in council poll
… A complaint has been sent by the Conservative party to Derbyshire police about suspected fraud in the Sinfin ward in the Derby City Council local elections – which will be held on May 6, the same day as the General Election.The complaint involves concerns that a voter was approached by men requesting her to fill in and sign three postal voting forms in favour of the Labour party… (Derby Telegraph)
Police probe ‘voting fraud’ at Bethnal Green & Bow
DETECTIVES have interviewed an election agent this week who lodged complaints of bogus voters being registered by rival political parties in London’s East End in the run-up to next Thursday’s polling.The election agent for George Galloway’s Respect Party, Rob Hoveman, reported the allegations to police and made a statement on Tuesday to Scotland Yard’s SO15 Special Branch.
Officers came down to Bow Road police offices in the Bethnal Green & Bow constituency where he raised the issue of bogus voters at ‘mail drop’ addresses. (East London Advertiser)
10 Comments
Postal voting should only be restricted to those who can’t physically get to a polling station.
Here we go . . . The Labour Party’s Postal Votes Scam swings into action; as predicted.
I hope the Lib Dems (& indeed, the Tories) are on the look out for this corruption – Labour will stop at nothing to retain power.
Sadly, postal voting is actually more secure and experiences less fraud than polling stations in the UK.
This is more a reflection on how bad our polling stations are than how good our postal vote system is. It pretty much comes down to who the returning officer is in your district. Many of them are careful and chase down all the issues; others just want to go home and will let people get away with anything. There seems to be remarkably little oversight of them.
Fortunately, we’ve never had a major issue with electoral fraud in the UK. Unfortunately, we’re not very well equipped to deal with one.
Labour are v. corrupt in Bethnal Green and Bow. Postal votes are sold to the highest bidder (i.e. Labour)
I’ve also seen Respect volunteers rounding up Bengali students (who can vote) for their postal vote. So this protesting by Galloway is a bit hypocritical.
Galloway? Hypocritical? I would never have thought it!
This is baloney balderdash and similar words. Not to say there isn’t any fraud at polling stations, but postal voting is almost completely insecure.
Tony Greaves
Whatever Galloway is, he is not ignorant of electoral law.
The H-word can reasonably be asked here where, right after alleging that he and friends were the victims of a Police cavalry charge, he calls upon Police to detain two men of Middle Eastern appearance within the centre of the British establishment.
Meanwhile in Blackburn…
…Jack Straw has been reported to police for “treating” voters: http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/04/jack_straw_face.html
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, Craig! Whatever happened to “innocent until proven guilty”?
I speak as someone whose blog was, at one point, Salim Mulla [1] Watch, but is there any evidence for a Tammany Hall type affair, or is the Alan Partridge of human rights advocacy doing a little bit of projection?
[1] A bigwig in the local Labour Party scene.