Postal vote system turns farcical

What started as a reform to increase British election turnout has descended to such a farce that staff counting this Thursday’s polls have needed lessons from the Forensic Science Service.
Postal voting on demand was supposed to herald a democratic golden age of greater participation and social inclusion, but its benefits have been exaggerated, a report concludes today. The story of how Britain slumped from a century of faith in the fairness of its elections is outlined by the Rowntree trust. The report shows that half the convictions for electoral malpractice since 2000 happened in just four Muslim communities in Lancashire and Birmingham. Vote-rigging has been linked to the biraderi (brotherhood) traditions of Pakistani, Kashmiri and Bangladeshi clans, the report says. Half the convictions for electoral malpractice since 2000 came from Muslim parts of Oldham, Blackburn, Burnley and Birmingham. Politicians had achieved “dramatic electoral success” by allying themselves to clans. But postal voting deprived women in particular of the secrecy of the ballot box, enabling clan chiefs to force relatives to mark their ballots at home for the clan’s chosen candidate. “The biraderi system is widely recognised to have provided significant forms of mutual support in those British Asian communities in which it has persisted, particularly for newly arrived migrants joining established communities in the UK,” the report says. “However, the hierarchical and essentially patriarchal nature of biraderi associations has drawn much criticism, particularly among second and third-generation British Asians. In particular, it is widely suggested that extended family and kinship networks, frequently with their origins in settlement patterns in Pakistan and Bangladesh, are mobilised to secure the support of up to several hundred electors, effectively constituting a ‘block vote’. “It has been widely suggested that the biraderi system disenfranchises voters, given the combination of a patriarchal clan system and widespread use of postal voting, in which ballot papers are completed within the family home or, in some cases, taken to a central facility (so called ‘voting factories’) for completion by party representatives.” Only 46 per cent of British Asians regard postal voting as safe. The Times