Month: June 2004

A wonderfully understated little piece appears in Wired News today:

Florida Voter Purge

A list of 47,000 “possible felons” is set to be purged from Florida's voter rolls. Local elections supervisors want to make sure the list is accurate and no legitimate voters are disenfranchised in November. In the 2000 presidential election George W. Bush “won” by just 537 votes after five weeks of recounts and challenges in Florida. During the recounts, reports surfaced that people had been removed from voting rolls even though they were not felons, so officials are naturally a bit testy about the massive purge.
— Beverly Hanly

A bit testy… and so they should be. Greg Palast showed rather convincingly that much of the 2000 'purge' was deliberately done to remove people from a demographic likely to vote Democrat. In fact they think anything between 20,000-50,000 votes were stolen!

(Interesting that in 2000 they purged 57,000 votes and this year it's 47,000 – why so similar Jeb?)

I saw yesterday a BBC local news spot on how complex the postal ballots were in parts of the North West region where there were council elections in addition to the European Parliament elections. A presenter bravely went through the steps of detaching the identification form, signing it and getting a witness to do so, voting (using two different methods), folding and inserting into envelope A only the (huge) ballots – ensuring that a barcode sticker was showing through a window. Then Envelope A had to be placed in envelope B with the declaration of identity in such a way that an address label showed through a window. “Phew” exclaimed the reporter and the presenter back in the studio. I sighed too. That's just WAY too difficult.

Thankfully, according to the one my partner received in Lancaster, the European-only postal ballots in the North West region are much simpler without detachable bits and barcodes to show in windows. The declaration of identity was also simpler, but still required a witness, unlike the postal ballots piloted in Brighton.

It's hard to know how to interpret a BBC report that a man has been arrested in Oldham for attempted elections fraud. Oldham is in one of the regions testing all postal ballots for the June 10th elections.

Publicising an arrest in this way could be an effective deterrent. It could also indicate that the police are being more vigilant on these matters. Alternatively the massive scale of these pilots could be encouraging more casual and opportunistic fraud than we've previously experienced. More attempts at fraud might well increase the likelihood of somebody being caught red-handed, which is notoriously difficult with postal ballots.

So says Lord Charlie Falconer, minister in charge of the Department of Constitutional Affairs. Lord Falconer, as regular readers will know, is only the latest Labour minister to be wheeled out in attempts to calm the fuss over the all-postal ballot pilots. The minister's take?

The scheme is working well. I think we should regard this as something of a success – not, as it were, be carping on the edges.

But the fuss continues and the LibDems and Tories are fielding some humdinging soundbites such as Charles Kennedy's “democratic disgrace”. The latest is in this Guardian/Press Association report. Thanks to the FIPR's ever vigilant Ian Brown for the link.

Michael Williams passed me a link to a great little bit of Onionery on e-voting kiosks. You can view the pseudo infograph online here or avoid a rather annoying advert by viewing the PDF version directly.

They've beautifully mixed the real with the (hopefully) imaginary. Take:

Not enough outlets in most high-school gymnasiums to plug in machines

and then look at: Machines themselves get 26 electoral votes

Both in the Onion's graphic – which is true and which is a joke?

In the Guardian's continuing coverage of the all postal ballot troubles Sam Younger, chairman of the Electoral Commission, essentially implies that we may be losing post, but not votes in the run up to June 10th.

Younger's logic is irresistible: Postal ballots are huge potential source of new income for Royal Mail, as Mr. Younger says: This is so important for the Royal Mail's standing, so much depends on it, that my guess is they will bust a gut. So it will probably be all right. What it does to the rest of their deliveries I don't know… In other words, don't hold your breath for normal mail but somehow they'll get those votes through. How reassuring for voters and Royal Mail customers alike.