Electoral fraud will be widespread in June

There is a misunderstanding of voting rights in the UK that extends to some of the most experienced political commentators in the country. Yesterday on 'Any Answers' Jonathan Dimbleby corrected a caller responding to the scandal of fake Pakistani student visas, saying "But they don't have the right to vote". Wrong. Any Commonwealth national in the UK, whatever their immigration or resident status, has the right to vote in both general and local elections. This includes real and fake students, real and fake visitors, those with leave to remain and illegal overstayers. Here in Lewisham it will include 20,000 Nigerians. It is estimated that there are up to 3m Commonwealth citizens of varying immigration status currently in the UK.

In 2001 the Labour government introduced postal and proxy voting on demand. In 2003 and 2004 the Electoral Commission called on the government to tighten checks on postal and proxy voting - and was ignored. The results have been clear to see;

• On 4/4/05 a judge declared void two local election results in Birmingham because of Labour postal vote fraud and said the evidence of fraud "would disgrace a banana republic"
• On 8/4/05 a Labour councillor in Blackburn was jailed for stealing 233 postal votes
• On 14/4/05 the Head of Birmingham's electoral team was suspended following the discovery of 1,000 uncounted postal votes
• In May 2005 police were investigating 25 cases of electoral fraud in 19 constituencies
• In April 2006 police were investigating postal vote fraud in Tower Hamlets, six other London boroughs and Birmingham
• In May and June 2006 police were called to investigate intimidation and vote rigging in Surrey, Coventry, London and Birmingham.

In 2006 Michael Pinto-Duschinsky gave evidence to a Commons Select Committee that there were 3.5m people registered on the electoral register who shouldn't be. In 2007 the Electoral Commission used NOP to estimate the extent of false registrations; in some voting districts, it was estimated that electoral registers were only 60% accurate.

In 2005, Labour ministers told Parliament that electoral fraud was 'very rare'. In 2006 the Electoral Commission received a file from the Crown Prosecution Service that detailed 390 cases of electoral fraud between 2000 and 2006.

In 2008 the Rowntree Trust produced a report 'Purity of Elections in the UK: Causes for Concern' that detailed serious failings and details of electoral fraud. The report found that postal and proxy voting had risen from just 2% of votes prior to Labour's introducing 'on demand' availability to 15% in 2005, with commensurate opportunities for large-scale fraud.

Right now, Labour canvassers are hyping the BNP threat in June on doorsteps across the country, painting a fearful picture, especially for minority ethnic populations. It will be little wonder if such populations then make massive recourse of fraululent votes in response. And everywhere local Labour officials must be turning a blind eye to this, or tacitly encouraging it, or even, as has been proved by their conviction for it in court so many times in the past, orchestrating it. 2009 will be no different.

It is shaming enough that the Boundary Commission has not acted to remove the inbuilt bias from our constituencies - detailed here by me in a previous post - but that this is compounded by widespread Labour vote-rigging and fraud with no government check or balance is deeply corrosive of our democracy.

Update
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See this South Tyneside blog for details of Labour electoral corruption currently being exposed there ...