There's no substitute for the ballot box

Published in the Evening Standard

Just for once, something big is going on in this country and London will play no part in it. That's not how things usually work. The capital plays such a dominant role in British life that, much to the chagrin of Manchester, Edinburgh and Cardiff, it's a rare day when the action takes place somewhere else.

But today is that today. Elections are underway for the Scottish parliament, Welsh assembly and local councils across England. Everywhere in fact - except here. Much is at stake, not only choosing what is, in effect, a government north of the border, but also delivering an electoral verdict on the Blair era as it enters its final days and shaping the political terrain for his probable successor, Gordon Brown. Yet in this key political moment, London will stay silent.

Still, we should put aside any pique and look on the bright side. There is an advantage to giving elections a miss this year, waiting instead till 2008 to choose a new mayor and London Assembly. No, I don't mean it gives a few more months for the Conservatives to continue their desperate quest to find somebody- anybody - to take on Ken Livingstone. Rather it gives London a chance to ensure we get our elections right. Because today too much of the country will get them wrong.

I'm not speaking about the choices Britons will make, but the way they will express those choices. Specifically, the unfolding scandal of the postal vote.

There was a time when a vote by mail was reserved only for those who could prove they couldn't make it to the polling station on election day. That changed in 2000 when a postal vote became available to anyone who wanted it, no questions asked. But this new system was open to extraordinary abuse. With no signature or date of birth required, it wasn't too hard to apply for postal votes on behalf of other people. You could then steal the ballot paper that was sent out, mark an x in the box and send it back - all in the name of a voter who remained wholly in the dark.

All this came to light in Birmingham's 2004 council elections, where a High Court judge found vote-rigging that would, in his words, "disgrace a banana republic." New figures from Birmingham this week suggested the problem was even worse than first thought: once the police and council started checking up on postal voters, the number of them fell by 20,000 - suggesting that at least that number were on the list thanks to fraud.

As so often, this mess began with good intentions. The government wanted to increase voter turnout which, in local contests especially, is often embarrassingly low. (London's council elections in 2002 saw a turnout of just 32 per cent.) Maybe turning up at a polling station was just too much hassle in our modern, all-convenience world. Make voting simpler, ran the logic, and more of us would do it.

But that was to overlook the gaping hole left open for fraud. Now ministers insist they have learned the lessons of Birmingham and that the postal votes used today will be "as secure as possible."

And yet it's hard to feel reassured. Because even if the government is right, and they do ensure that every postal vote matches properly the elector it should belong to, that will still leave a major problem. The system will be safe - but it will no longer be secret. Only the closed curtain of the voting booth, and the locked metal of the ballot box, can guarantee that.

Take that Birmingham case. Much of the fraud went on in heavily Muslim wards, where Labour feared a backlash following the Iraq war. The six guilty men were Labour councillors, who were said to have either filled in voters' ballot papers without their knowledge or to have pressured individuals to deliver their households' votes. Ballots were sometimes collected door to door, so that they could be checked for the right answer and then sent off. The secrecy of the ballot was gone.

And secrecy matters. Those first campaigners for British democracy, the Chartists, listed a secret ballot among their key six demands. When William Gladstone was finally won over to the cause of a secret ballot, it was because he understood that, without it, workers and tenants would be pressured by employers and landlords to cast their vote the "right" way. Only a secret ballot could prevent bribery, he said, "because men will not pay for that which they do not know they will ever receive." If you don't know what the voter's doing behind that curtain, there's no point bribing them.

It's this principle, crucial in a true democracy, that is threatened by absentee voting, even when it's sold as glossy modernisation. If people vote online or by phone, there's not only a huge risk of fraud - as the recent TV vote scandals have proved - but also no guarantee of secrecy, and therefore no protection against family or community pressure. The distinguished former foreign correspondent, John M Morrison, now campaigning hard on this question, says with a sigh, "I have reported elections in all sorts of dodgy places in Africa and the former Soviet Union but I never imagined that the UK would lead Europe in trying to abolish the ballot box."

Voting is one of those areas where simplest is best. Americans have developed all kinds of elaborate electronic machinery and complex ballot papers. The result was the chaos of Florida in 2000 and the widespread allegations of fraud in Ohio in 2004. If voters had simply used a pencil, piece of paper and metal box both messes could have been avoided (and Al Gore would probably be president).

And if we're worried about turnout, there are other solutions. Labour MP Emily Thornberry suggests either weekend voting or, better still, making election day a mid-week bank holiday, so that people have plenty of time to vote (without the temptation of taking the day as part of a long weekend).

There are more radical steps still. A proportional, fairer voting system would surely encourage greater participation, because you would know that every vote counted. Close contests, like the high turnout presidential battle in France, always help. Or we could have some politicians who genuinely inspire. There's lots we could do, without jettisoning something we've got right. The secret ballot was hard-won. Let's not stick it in an envelope and send it into oblivion.

Posted on May 3, 2007 10:49 AM

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