I voted this morning. When the ladies handed me my ballot slips*, I asked them "Am I allowed to vote for myself?" Which earned me the blankest response I have ever experienced, let alone raising a wry grin or a groan or something, despite my full name and address appearing on both the voting card and the ballot slip**. Ah well.
* After carefully cross-referencing the number on my voting card to their master list and then entering the numbers pre-printed on the back of each ballot slip to the master list - the UK hasn't had truly 'secret ballots' for decades, I was told about this as a kid.
** So if you live in Buckhurst Hill/Loughton South, you know what to do ...
Inconceivable
1 hour ago
22 comments:
"Break a leg"...!! :-)
Hmm... w/v = "pubbra" - a concatenation of two of my major interests in life! ;-)
Isn't ballot secrecy a requirement to support fair elections?
When the ballot administrators are able to trace voter's choices back to the person, its usually called 'corruption' in hotter countries than the UK's.
Pogo, thanks.
Paul, that's the strange thing. Back in the 1970s one of my mum's friends (who was a Tory who worked in the polling station) told my mum, matter of factly "We know who has voted and how they voted - it helps us decide where to do a bit of last minute canvassing", my Mum was a bit shocked, but the friend told her how it was done (which is exactly how it is still done today, as I outlined in the post).
I've always wondered why I get very little in the way of political mail drops through my letterbox. I wonder if the words "the only good politician is a dead one" on successive ballot slips is the reason?
Oh, and, good luck today Mark. Hope you don't take the comment above personally :D
no Mark, absolutely NOT !
what's being referred to is the age-old business of 'knocking-up' (no sniggering there at the back) whereby the parties have canvassing returns (more or less accurate, more or less out of date) of their soi-dissant 'pledges'. They post tellers outside the polling centre (perfectly legal, the law allows for it so long as no interference takes place) who ask voters for their voting-cards, or just for their numbers or names and addresses - which most voters cheerfully give, though they don't have to, of course - and check them off against their lists.
(The parties generally cooperate with each other on this, in a friendly manner.)
So - they know 'who has voted' but they've only a rough guess as to how. They despatch their 'knockers-up' accordingly.
Seriously, I've been involved in probably hundreds of elections around the UK, and NEVER has knocking-up been conducted on any other basis. When you are working in a campaign-centre, you see exactly how the knocking-up lists are prepared - it's entirely mundane (and actually a big waste of time ... except possibly in the most tightly-fought of marginal seats)
I don't dispute that the poll is technically not secret, as you say. But as to correlating the numbers and passing the data to political parties as you suggest, if this does in fact happen, it will only be in some ghastly corner of Birmingham. But I don't believe it does.
How quickly (and indeed whether) local parties find out the supposedly 'secret' info is another topic, but secret it ain't. The people who sit outside and ask you how you voted are entirely innocuous, of course.
Gosh, even in Russia, the voting was secret.
"Gosh, even in Russia, the voting was secret" although, to be fair, there was only one name on the ballot paper.
In Soviet Russia, party votes for you!
(hey, a Russian Reversal that actually makes sense!)
I used to do telling in my youth and by collecting the voting-card numbers only you could tell if your "promises" had voted and, if not,get them to vote."Knocking up" which I experienced for the first time a few years ago when I did another stint of telling is I think comparatively recent: in the old days people who had n't yet voted were given lifts by supporters cars" which is why bad weather on polling days traditionally favoured the Tories who had more cars back then.
There was a fair amount of co-operation and rival tellers used to swap numbers when opposition tellers went missing.
The poll is by no means secret and I once researched an article for a paper on the procedure which involved all the numbered voting slips being stored and checked against the record of who had voted (also cross-referenced like raffle tickets).The returning officer who i interviewed boasted how easily he could pull out identifiiable voting slips.
The solution is of course identity cards.If the Guv issued identity cards and unnumbered voting slips I might begin to trust them ,but somehow I think we'd end up with numbered voting slips and identity cards as well.
Best of luck (which bizarrely is what all the tellers wished each other when polls closed last time.)
DBC Read said"The solution is of course identity cards"
Surely the solution is to stop recording the number of the ballot slip against the electoral roll number, or to properly prevent anyone from having access to both sets of information? Even the simple step of having the officer in charge of the polling station retain each polling card (and then the number of cards can be tallied against the number of ballot papers issued) rather than matching each person to their 'secret' vote would be better.
ID cards to vote would mean that your voting record could be uploaded to your identity record and what kind of injustices would that precipitate? Voted for the opposition last time? No hospital treatment for you then .. .. ..
@captainff
Please explain in practical terms how Returning Officers will encode how you voted onto your Identity Card especially if the slips are not numbered,which is the scenario depicted.Also such a carry-on would need primary legislation:if whistleblowers of a right-wing bent
discovered it was going on covertly
you can imagine the publicity.
It is strange that such right-wingers are always going on about guarding our own borders but trust
everybody to behave themselves without proof of identity even in a so-called war on terrorism or a terrorist war on UK.
DBC Reed: "The solution is of course identity cards."
The solution to the problem of doing a lot of work wading through lists and lists of paperwork, is to computerize the process so that you can simply query the database and get all the information you want about thousands of individuals immediately cut and sorted in the most digestable form.
I don't think I have ever come across someone who gets things so comprehensively arse about tit.
Well done.
DBC Reed: "Please explain in practical terms how Returning Officers will encode how you voted onto your Identity Card"
He won't have to. The ballot has a serial number which ties up with the counterfoil, so far reasonable enough.
Today I took my ballot and the scrutineer writes the serial number against my name on his list of eligible voters.
Now the ballot is no longer anonymous.
I would say ballots are already machine readable, how difficult is is to detect an 'X' at a given location on a sheet of paper? Not very.
So your ballot paper is already machine readable and we can tie up the 'X' on the paper and its associated serial number with the individual on the electoral roll.
The next step will be 'Diebold' ballot readers, and 'bobs your auntie' everything feeds straight into the database.
"Identity cards"
By the way, it's not the card, the card is just a tag. It's the database the card is tagged to that's the problem.
The truth is that at the last election, all the coercion was done beforehand within businesses and factories. However, when they went to vote at the schools and other polling stations on the day, it was a private affair in booths, with no cctv, as in our tradition. This was no doubt for the observers. The ballot paper had the candidates and nae of party listed, the paper was folded and placed in a box over in the corner, not under anyone's scrutiny. So technically, with about a dozen names to choose from, it was fair, Umbongo.
@one of the anonymous bloggers ( so paranoid they won't like Mark Wadsworth,Tim Worstall and indeed myself put their names to their opinions,so causing pointless confusion).
I was suggesting getting rid of identifying numbers on voting slips
with identity cards to prove who you are as you entered the polling station.That was the whole point.
With unnumbered slips your vote becomes untraceable by returning officers ,staff at the count etc.
I think we all agree, paranoid or not,that the numbered counterfoil system is open to abuse.
When I voted last night in West London, I took this up with the polling booth staff. The conversation and their argument went something like this.
Me: "Excuse me, why are you writing down the polling card and ballot paper reference against my name and address?"
Them: "That's what we do"
Me: "But that means that you can later find out what I voted".
Them: " ... erm ..."
(At this point a chap who was until now, sitting quietly in the corner, pipes up as if on cue)
Corner: "It is for audit purposes. If there is a legal challenge from one of the candidates, we need to be able to prove that votes have not been double counted"
Me: "But can't you see that this is undemocratic - you are able to see how I voted"
Corner: "Only if authorised by a magistrate"
Me: "Surely you know how little that means"
Corner: " ... erm ... "
So there you have it. We are told to simply trust those administering the system that it is not going to be abused. From an information security point of view (for that is my business), I can see that as long as the contents of the ballor box and polling card/ballot paper register are kept completely separate, and only single records are made accessible on an individual challenge basis, voter anonimity can be largely maintained. This would require vigilence and impose inconvenience though.
Therefore I fear that the feint-ruled notepad of ballot paper numbers/polling card numbers are almost certainly packed up into the same box and sent on to be counted together.
DBC Reed said "I was suggesting getting rid of identifying numbers on voting slips
with identity cards to prove who you are as you entered the polling station.That was the whole point.
With unnumbered slips your vote becomes untraceable by returning officers ,staff at the count etc.
I think we all agree, paranoid or not,that the numbered counterfoil system is open to abuse."
I do agree with you that the numbered counterfoil leaves the possibility of abuse of the system and I agree that unnumbered slips are the way forward.
I admit I misread your original point re: ID cards and for that I apologise. A simpler solution would be for each voter to exchange their polling card for their ballot paper? While I understand that it isn't a perfect solution it would be easier and cheaper to implement than ID cards would.
@captainff
Many thanks for the apology ; something I have never received before on the Net.Lost for words!
The problem with exchanging your polling card for the ballot paper is that polling cards can be posted
into empty addresses and can even pile up in the halls of multi-tenanted dwellings which is how many fraudsters come by proofs of identity.
I am by no means convinced about ID cards either although I am more pro than anti.I would be more convinced if the Guv said ID cars would lead to unnumbered voting slips but ,as I said before,the chances are we'd get the worst of both worlds.
DBC REED: "With unnumbered slips your vote becomes untraceable by returning officers, staff at the count etc."
Good God!!
Why don't you just suggest everyone bring ten or twenty of their own pre-printed ballots with then to the booth?
The serial number on the ballot is primarily there for purposes of security. Just like the serial number on a bank note.
Yes, there is a risk you might be traced to find out how you voted. But I fancy it might be just too much trouble to bother.
Both of the suggestions to make the process anonymous - removing the serial number from the ballot & Id cards - would lay the whole process open to outrageous fraud in the first instance and totalitarian coercion in the second.
I've just read Paul's comment above and you know, that's horrifying. If it happened precisely that way and I have no reason to suppose it didn't, then that's a clear breach of secret voting.
I'm going to check with my Russian mate over there whether that's how it happened last election. It may have. I saw people collecting their papers, go to the booths, vote and put the vote in a box in the corner but who's to know if the number had been recorded beside the address?
That's outrageous.
Paul, if you don't mind, I'm going to blog on that tomorrow.
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