On Thursday, May 3, 2018, the United Kingdom will go to the polls for local elections in 32 London boroughs, 34 metropolitan boroughs, 68 district and borough councils and 17 unitary authorities. In many parts of the country, these races are expected to be tight, with Labour and the Conservatives both on around 40 per cent of the vote in recent opinion polls.
But despite the fact that a few hundred votes one way or another could decide some of these races, those who make the trip to their local polling station will cast their ballots in an electoral system that is so trusting that it is wide open to manipulation. Despite Britain’s status as one of the world’s oldest democracies, the safeguards on our electoral process are actually primitive by global standards.
In many African countries, for example, voters are registered using their fingerprints or some other form of biometric identification. This makes it possible to verify voters biometrically when they turn up at polling stations, ensuring that only those who are registered are able to cast ballots, and that no one is able to vote twice.
Although many of these hi-tech systems are supported and funded by British aid money, no similar methods have been proposed back home. Instead, our system is based on the expectation that voters and candidates can be trusted to follow the rules because they want to, not because they have to. That can be a dangerous assumption.
When political leaders around the world figure out that it is possible to manipulate elections to their own advantage, they usually do so. This raises an important question: how safe are our elections?
It is easy to think that Britain is inoculated against electoral manipulation because we are somehow above this kind of behaviour. History suggests that this is not true. Instead, British politicians have regularly flouted a number of electoral regulations, especially those relating to campaign finance.
In the space of just two years between 2016 and 2017, the Conservative Party was fined a record £70,000 for submitting a spending return that failed to disclose payments worth at least £104,765, the Labour Party was fined £20,000 for undeclared election spending totalling around £150,000, and the Liberal Democrats were fined the same amount for conveniently forgetting about £180,000 worth of bills.
The situation got so bad that it prompted the chair of the Electoral Commission, Sir John Holmes, to lament that parties are knowingly breaking the law because the penalties for doing so are weak. As he put it: “There is a risk that some political parties might come to view the payment of these fines as a cost of doing business.”
In recent years one of the most vulnerable parts of the system has been the postal vote, which allows people to cast a ballot without actually going to the polling station. Because there are no effective checks that people have not been pressured into filling out a postal vote for a specific party, or that postal votes have not simply been faked and submitted from made up addresses.
In 2009, for example, a Conservative councillor was jailed for using “ghost voters” to win a local council election. Little was done to tighten up the system, and so five years later the mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, was able to use a similar strategy to give his election campaign the edge. But although Rahman’s deceit was exposed, weaknesses in the investigation conducted by the Met Police meant that he faced no criminal charges – although he was banned from standing again.
The number of accusations of election malpractice – usually around 150 in any given local election year – have led to concerns that not enough is being done to protect our democracy. One solution that has been proposed is to introduce more stringent voter identification requirements.
As a result, the Cabinet Office is running pilot schemes in five cities to try and tighten the system up. In Bromley, Gosport and Woking, voters will be asked to prove their identity by showing a photo ID, a utility bill, or similar. Swindon and Watford will trial a variation of this theme, with voters given pre-issued polling cards that they will be asked to take with them to the polling station. If the new systems work well they will be rolled out more comprehensively in 2020.
In principle anything that strengthens the electoral process is a good thing but there are two problems with this idea. The first is that we know from recent experience in the United States and other countries that making ID requirements more stringent often discourages certain communities from voting. Precisely because they are less confident of their rights and less likely to have identification, these kinds of requirements are more likely to exclude younger, older, homeless, and black and ethnic minority individuals.
For this reason, they tend to be introduced by more right-of-centre governments who reason that they have little to lose – and potentially something to gain – if poorer and minority voters stay away from the polls. But those who care about democracy should be worried, because it would make our political system less inclusive.
The second problem is that there is actually very little evidence that elections are being manipulated by people casting multiple ballots at polling stations – as opposed to flouting rules on campaign expenditure and postal voting, where serious problems have repeatedly been exposed. In other words, this seems to be a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
A better and more balanced response would therefore be to actually enforce the existing rules more effectively, and to increase the punishment for breaking them. So long as it pays to cheat, our electoral system will remain vulnerable to abuse.
Nic Cheeseman is professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham. Brian Klaas is a fellow in comparative politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. They are the authors of How to Rig an Election
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
