There are undoubtedly greater difficulties with postal voting. My major concern is that it undermines the secrecy of the ballot. When ballot papers go into people’s homes, they are likely to be seen as a family affair, in contrast to the secrecy involved in going into a corner of a polling station to vote. As I was saying in response to the hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon), I believe that it is better for people to turn up to vote in person and that that should be facilitated. That would reduce the need for excessive postal voting.
I shall not go through all the constituencies on my list, but I should point out that my own has an area of 122 square miles, or about 85,000 acres. That is about the maximum area that could conveniently have only four registration places. Such an arrangement would simply be unreasonable in a bigger constituency, such as that of my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome.
There is a broader point to make: the rural areas often get forgotten. There is a polling station in my constituency that is in somebody’s porch. About 85 people go to vote there. There are even smaller polling stations across the country; some have only a couple of dozen electors who are eligible to vote in them. We used to make it easy for people to turn up and vote, and if we are introducing new democratic rights, we ought to make it similarly easy for people to turn up and exercise them.
We should think about the rural areas: there have fewer people, but their democratic rights are just important as those of people who live in dense urban areas, as the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) so rightly said. There are differences between constituencies, and we recognise them in other ways. In passing, it is worth mentioning the great county of Yorkshire, which has a
particularly large number of seats that cover large areas and have small populations. Yorkshire has more acres than there are words in the Bible, if the Apocrypha is excluded, and it is divided into very large geographical constituencies. Again, each of them ought to have more than four places for people to go to. I hope that the Government will listen on this matter, and understand the need for rural populations to exercise their rights as freely, properly and easily as the urban mass population.