7 May 2015
Democracy under siege
by John Watson
It is not often that a 200 page legal judgement can be described as “a good read”, so the decision of the Election Court in relation to the Tower Hamlets mayoral elections of 2014 is something of an achievement. The judge, Richard Mawrey QC, is dispassionate and logical, both in his exposition of this somewhat arcane area of the law and in his analysis of the evidence. There is no doubting his expertise as one is led through the byways of electoral malpractice to his conclusion that the election of the mayor Lutfur Rahman and his sidekick Alibor Choudhury was void under the Representation of the People Act 1983. But what spectacular byways they are! With ghost voters, double voting, misuse of postal votes, false allegations of hate crimes, payments for canvassers, bribery, findings of illegal spiritual influence and intimidation of voters, it has the exotic feel of the 18th-century. Add a rotten borough and a few bad eggs and the picture would be complete. It is believed that an appeal is being considered but surely there are too many different grounds for there to be much likelihood of success. A more likely way forward must be a review by the police to consider whether any charges should be brought.
The Law Commission is already carrying out a review of the law in this area and the Judge gave them some useful pointers in his decision. No doubt that will lead to a clarification of the law and an updating of the procedures through which elections can be challenged. Still, if we step back from the technicalities there are some wider questions and the first of these is whether the current system of voting makes it too easy to manipulate the system. The widespread availability of postal votes, for example, is almost an invitation to the unscrupulous. Go into an old peoples home, collect up the forms from those who do not understand the system and fill them in with your party’s name. It really isn’t very difficult. Then too, it gives you a way of checking how people have voted. The strength of the secret ballot is that it makes it very difficult to put pressure on an elector. With a postal vote it is easy. “Just show me the form, my dear, before you post it”. Can it be right that battered wives should lose their right to choose their candidate along with so much else? Postal votes certainly need to be restricted.
Then there is the question of the ghost votes, that is votes by people who do not really reside at the address at which they are registered. What should be done about that? Well it is an easy thing to check so how about a few raids by local authorities to see whether those registered are resident or not with a prison sentence for anyone involved in fraud? There wouldn’t be many false registrations if they carried that sort of risk.
I’m sure that there are other steps which can be taken to avoid electoral manipulation at local level – and if more power is to be devolved to the regions this will become ever more important – but if we are to protect our democracy we need to go further. At the moment there are provisional recommendations from the Boundary Commission which have never been implemented. That is because the Liberal Democrats denied them support in retaliation for the government dropping the House of Lords Reform Bill 2012. No doubt the party leaders thought this a fair penalty to impose on the Conservatives, who would have been favoured by the changes, for dropping a reform which they themselves saw as important. In fact they were wrong. By opposing the reforms on this ground, and of course resisting them on the basis that they were unfair would have been quite a different matter, they imposed a penalty on the British public. It is our right to have the democratic process fairly managed and that is not a right which should be taken away by any party as part of the game of political football. Like control of interest rates, the control of Parliamentary boundaries should be taken away from the politicians. They cannot be trusted with it.
