First, I emphasise that all political parties have had members who are responsible for electoral fraud. In Birmingham it has tended to be the Labour party, but that is not to say that any one party is perfect or any one party is necessarily much worse than any other.
I have an unusual experience as a Member of the House in that I have drafted election petitions. The best known is the one for Aston. Less known is that for Sparkhill, which dealt with issues of personation. When it was passed to some lawyers, they missed the deadline for serving it, and because of that it was never considered in court. So whereas in 2002 it might have been possible to have proven the quantity of personation that was going on, in fact it came to the elections of 2004, when there were election petitions in Aston ward and Bordesley Green ward, for us to look substantially at postal vote fraud. To start with, most of the evidence came from the fact that the Labour candidates were found some time in the early morning on an industrial estate in Aston checking that there were three Labour votes on each of the 273 ballot papers there because they did not trust each other to mark them with three Labour votes, it being a three-up election, thinking that the person with the most votes gets elected for four years. A number of the ballot papers in the then Springfield ward were cast with only one Labour vote if they were postal votes, so it was reasonable to assume that the Labour candidates could not necessarily trust each other and therefore their reasoning for sitting late in the morning to look at the ballot papers was justified.
In trying to deal with election fraud, the Bill tries to ensure that the people who are on the electoral roll should be there, and that is a good thing to do. What it does not do and where there is a big gap—although I intend this as a probing new clause—is to try to ensure that people cast their own vote. Historically, there has been a tendency at times for there to be a sort of informal proxy. This has gone on for decades; it is nothing massively new. People think that someone is away and somebody else goes to vote for them. That has also turned into other situations where parties cast votes intentionally for people that they do not expect to vote. We have one way of spotting that through tendered votes. For those people who do not know, if someone turns up at the polling station and is told that they have already voted—it could be that the wrong name was marked on the register—they can get a tendered vote, a pink ballot paper, which is put in an envelope, so that if there is an election petition it is possible to consider the tendered votes and see whether they would have made any difference to a narrow election result. The difficulty, as we have seen in Birmingham, is that vans of people can go from polling station to polling station casting a vote in each one. “Newsnight” found out some of the details of that.
Anyone who is interested in these issues must read the full judgment of Richard Mawrey, an electoral commissioner. He has done a number of election courts since, but he was the electoral commissioner who dealt with the Aston and Bordesley Green election petitions. We have to consider how to ensure that elections are honest. We cannot entirely rely on the apparatus of the state to do that. In his judgment at paragraph 150 he says:
“The reaction of the police”—
to the allegations of election fraud—
“can best be summed up by drawing attention to the code name they gave to the complaints of malpractice—Operation Gripe. This indicates better than anything else their view that the whole business was a complete waste of their time and that Mr Hemming and the other complainants were a tiresome nuisance.”
I may be a nuisance at times, but at paragraph 264 he said:
“As set out above, in the course of the campaign the Liberal Democrats asserted on several occasions that the Labour Party candidates and their supporters were cheating. Mr Hemming and his team made their complaints to the police and the police largely ignored them.”
Paragraph 265 says:
“Mr Hemming also complained to Mr Owen, to be told, politely but firmly (and certainly correctly), that the Elections Office could not intervene.”
There are issues there. The elections office has to handle the paperwork of the elections in a way that is seen to be fair. My particular concern at that election was that the 273 arrested ballot papers found their way to be counted, and, most importantly, I as leader of the Liberal Democrats and Mike Whitby as leader of the Conservatives at the time, were not told that 273 ballot papers had been arrested on an industrial estate and found their way into the count. So the idea that one casts a vote and it goes off to an industrial estate, the police arrest it after a little discussion and then take it in is quite strange.
Paragraph 707 says:
“But, when all that is said and done, Mr Hemming was right and his critics were wrong. He said that there was a massive, Birmingham-wide electoral fraud by the Labour Party and there was in fact massive Birmingham-wide electoral fraud by the Labour party. He may have played the part of Cassandra, but like Cassandra his prophecies were true. He emerges from the case with credit which is more than can be said for those police officers who treated his complaints as no more than Operation Gripe.”
But the most important part of the judgment from Richard Mawrey was paragraph 717, which says:
“The systems to deal with fraud are not working well. They are not working badly. The fact is that there are no systems to deal realistically with fraud and there never have been. Until there are, fraud will continue unabated.”
With personation, in theory it is possible to appoint polling agents who can stand in the polling station and potentially put the statutory question to people: “Are you such and such a person of such and such address?” If a woman comes in and says, “Yes, I’m Gordon Brown of such and such address,” the fact that that woman—unless she has changed her name by deed pool—is unlikely to be telling the truth is no good reason for the presiding officer not to give her a ballot paper.