Friday, April 15, 2005
The Great Vote Robbery
The headline story in today's Times confirms my view that the big story on election night won't be who's won but who's stolen the votes. The evidence suggests that fraud in this election is large-scale, systematic and impossible to police.
The Times report begins,
Applications for postal votes for the general election have risen by up to 500 per cent in marginal seats, sparking concern about the risk of electoral fraud.The government, meanwhile, appears to have accepted Britain's status as a banana republic.
A survey by The Times shows that applications have almost trebled since 2001. In some key marginals the numbers have risen even further. In Cheadle, Manchester, where the Liberal Democrats have a majority of 33, the number of applications stands at 8,226, nearly five times the 1,695 cast in 2001.
The Times has learnt that the Government has, for the first time in a general election, invited international observers to monitor the last week of the campaign. The Warsaw-based Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights will decide in the next two days whether to accept the invitation. "We don’t investigate and we would not micromanage the police, but postal voting will be looked at if we accept," a spokeswoman said.Not surprising, really, when you read this:
[A returning officer] said that a Labour Party expert had claimed: "You need 75,000 votes to win elections in this country and I know where they all are."You can see the Times's chart of constituencies with unusually large postal vote applications here. If one were to draw up a list of the court cases in May, I suspect it would look very similar.
# posted by Simon Titley @ 12:43 pm 
