By Mark Smulian
11 May 2010
This year’s election had inadequate safeguards against voter fraud because of delays in implementing tough new measures, officials have said.
Allegations of postal voting fraud have surfaced in Tower Hamlets, Blackburn, Bradford, Calderdale and a number of other areas.
John Turner, chief executive of the Association of Electoral Administrators, told Public Finance: ‘The changes made in 2006 to require a signature and date of birth on postal vote applications have improved things, but the problem is not so much postal voting as the state of the electoral register.
‘We need individual registration, rather than by heads of household, otherwise you get cases like the one in Tower Hamlets where there are supposed to be 24 people living in one flat.’
Turner said the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009 provided for individual registration, but not until 2017.
‘The tragedy is that we will have to go through at least one more general election and many local elections before that,’ he said.
‘You can’t just take books out of a public library without proving who you are but you can get on the electoral register.
‘Individual registration requires a lot of work but it does not take eight years.’
An Electoral Commission spokesman said individual registration would take until 2017 because ‘it is a big change that requires a lot of work’.
11 May 2010
This year’s election had inadequate safeguards against voter fraud because of delays in implementing tough new measures, officials have said.
Allegations of postal voting fraud have surfaced in Tower Hamlets, Blackburn, Bradford, Calderdale and a number of other areas.
John Turner, chief executive of the Association of Electoral Administrators, told Public Finance: ‘The changes made in 2006 to require a signature and date of birth on postal vote applications have improved things, but the problem is not so much postal voting as the state of the electoral register.
‘We need individual registration, rather than by heads of household, otherwise you get cases like the one in Tower Hamlets where there are supposed to be 24 people living in one flat.’
Turner said the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009 provided for individual registration, but not until 2017.
‘The tragedy is that we will have to go through at least one more general election and many local elections before that,’ he said.
‘You can’t just take books out of a public library without proving who you are but you can get on the electoral register.
‘Individual registration requires a lot of work but it does not take eight years.’
An Electoral Commission spokesman said individual registration would take until 2017 because ‘it is a big change that requires a lot of work’.
