I’ve just voted in the UK general election, it was my first experience as a voter in this country, and I was astounded at how trusting the system is. Everyone on the voting roll gets sent a card a couple of weeks before the election, with the location of their polling station and their voting reference number, which you are supposed to take with you when you vote. Of course, I lost mine, so I armed myself with two forms of photo ID, proof of address and proof of residential status (being one of those eeeeeeeeeeeevil immigrants the Tories want to keep out ) and went to the polling station on my way to work.
There were a grand total of two voters ahead of me as I patiently waited my turn, and when the time came, I stepped up with my apology and papers ready. “I don’t need to see that” said the election officer as I presented my driver’s license, :eek: “Who are you and where do you live?” I told her, was crossed of the list, had my ballot paper marked, voted and went to work. I could have given my neighbour’s name and voted for him. I could have read another name off the roll while she was looking mine up and returned later in the day (I’m sure they wouldn’t have recognised me) and voted again. It would be illegal, but soooooo easy…
In South Africa, you need your government-issued ID book to vote - it gets checked agains the electoral roll, stamped and your hand/finger gets marked with an indelible dye to prevent you from voting more than once. Even under Apartheid this was the way it was done(except for the dye bit), so I guess I expected all other elections to be run in a similar manner - it is amazing to me that this election is basically being run on trust.
Yes, you’re right. I kind of like it, but I don’t see it staying this way for much longer.
While your chances of getting caught are low, the chances of fraud being discovered if more than a few people do it are high. (e.g. with a 50% voter’s turn out, each time someone votes for someone else there’s a 50% chance that the real voter will turn up and find a tick already beside their name.) So any widespread fraud should quickly be detected, with terrible consequences.
With enough people doing it to bring the election result into doubt, we’d have to do the whole thing over again! And this time it would be complicated by anti-fraud precautions. In my opinion, the living would envy the dead…
Yup. And I guess the argument for not changing it is that it doesn’t cause any problems. (The postal-vote farce is a different matter.)
As matt points out, anybody voting under other names would quickly cause a problem. It would possibly be easier to make false entries on the electoral register (one year while at university I was on it in two places by accident :wally ) - but more than a few isolated cases would again probably be noticed.
Then again, perhaps it’s so easy to defraud the system, that every election is being fixed and we don’t notice… :eek:
Am I correct in assuming that this is the first UK election that has been observed by international monitors? Did the UK invite them, or is there some international body that looks around for states with dodgy electoral practices and dives in to check? Are they just concerned about postal voting, or is the whole process under scrutiny? The process does appear to be designed deliberately to tempt electoral fraud.
I’ve not heard that one?! You may be getting confused with various investigations that are underway into problems with postal votes, but there’s certainly no international monitors here.
I should have done some homework before posting - but I found some comment in the Times Online “Last week the OSCE announced that it would be sending a 10-strong team to Britain to monitor the election for a week before polling day. It is believed to be the first time that a British general election will be subject to formal international monitoring.”
I find it vaguely depressing, but maybe that’s just latent racism or xenophobia. It does appear that the OSCE decided that the UK system was flaky enough to deserve a once over.
Maybe no one will commit fraud. Voting in my town simply requires that you give them your name, and then they look on the list and check you off. It’s been like this the whole time I’ve lived there (since 97) at the very least, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s been like this for decades. Fraud would be easy to spot, because with only 3 or 4 thousand registered voters, it’s not difficult to figure out two people want to vote under the same name. I imagine they’d require the second person to show ID to sort if out. (Though if the name was stolen before the right person voted, it’d be hard to find the fraud to press charges) So far, it’s never happened. I suspect the reason it’s not considered worth attempting is that the small towns in this area have high voter turn out, so the odds of picking the name of someone who wouldn’t vote at all are small, so you’d be risking being the second person voting on that name.
Apologies for rubbishing the idea that there’s outside monitoring…but on futher investigation, it looks like the OSCE is using it as a research exercise, rather than as a fraud-prevention measure:
I know for a fact there is fraud - when I lived in rented accomodation as a student we would receive several polling cards in the names of former tenants. It was not unknown for current tenants to use these cards, in the tradition of ‘vote early, vote often’.
It is astonishingly easy to vote. My Dominican husband was with me when I voted in the UK several years ago, and he could not believe that it was a matter of walking down the street to the community hall, giving the clerk your name - no ID required - and going to the booth and voting. No queues, no laborious verifications of ID, no dipping your finger in indelible ink.
In the Dominican Republic voting is segregated - women before noon, men after noon. People endure hours of queuing in the tropical heat. More often than not they have to travel to vote in their home town, rather than the nearest polling station to their place of residence. The measures taken to pre-empt fraud are more effective in making life difficult for voters than in succeeding in their goal.
The end result is always dire, whoever they vote for, so it’s a wonder they go to the trouble. It’s not mandatory or anything.
FWIW, in NY we pollworkers are not allowed to even ask for ID either. You can register in a large variety of ways and THEN is when you show the ID; at the polling place you give your name and then sign the roll, and we look to see if it looks like your signature, and in you go to the Giant Gray Shoup Machine o’ Freedom. You get a card at home telling you when and where to vote but you don’t have to bring it along. There are usually least ten machines at each voting place so if you were going to defraud us, you’d have to know which precinct the name you planned to forge was in already, as otherwise we’d just send you from table to table until your name matched in one of the books. And we’d notice if you tried to vote twice. Never had that happen.
Not saying that this is necessarily the case in the Dominican Republic, but ‘security measures’ are a common method of voter manipulation. For example, if your party is disliked by the poor, make everybody travel to their place of birth to vote, which the poorest will be least able to do.
I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to commit fraud in my township. All you’d need to do is give the name and address of someone who didn’t plan to vote. Given low turnout (in the U.S. at least) you’d have a good chance with just guessing, although looking at poll books from prior elections would up your chances.
What helps is that at the polls, we don’t check signatures against what’s on file.
) and went to the polling station on my way to work.