“Our democracy is being dangerously undermined”, said Libby Purves in The Times. A Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust report, Purity of Elections in the UK: Causes for Concern, should put all of us on “red alert”. Rot is affecting the democratic process; from democracy flows government, whose “actions affect everything that keeps us safe”.
The report makes “embarrassing reading”, said Marcel Berlins in The Guardian. It is particularly critical of the reform expanding postal voting (voters no longer have to give a reason for not turning up in person), and of allowing one householder to control the slips of everyone at that address.
The Trust isn’t the first to criticise our electoral system, said The Guardian. In December the Electoral Commission found the UK’s whole electoral administration “inconsistently managed, under-resourced and under-supported”. In January, the Council of Europe’s election monitoring group said that the UK delivered democratic elections “despite the vulnerabilities in its electoral system”.
Those vulnerabilities are plain to see, said Purves. The 42 convictions for electoral fraud between 2000 and 2007, are “probably the tip of an iceberg”. Richard Mawrey, QC, said the system would “disgrace a banana republic” and that continued fraud would be “lethal to the democratic process”. He added that roll-stuffing, where the nominated householder creates fictitious voters at the stroke of a pen, is “childishly simple to commit”.
Individual registration is the most obvious way to clean up this mess, said The Times. There is a danger that law-abiding eligible voters will fall off the lists through inertia, and turnout (down from 84% in 1950 to just below 60% in 2005) would fall, said Purves. But “turnout matters less than integrity“. Those who do walk to the booth must be absolutely sure that their vote “counts no more and no less than anybody else’s“.