Demanding ID at polling stations solves a problem that doesn't exist...

"It's about fraud", they cry!! Yet it turns out there isn't any fraud - or at least not the sort of fraud that gets sorted by demanding little old ladies in rural Wiltshire provide ID in order to vote:

Figures from the Electoral Commission show personation fraud at the polling station accounted for eight out of the 266 allegations made last year. No further action was taken for seven of these, and one allegation was resolved locally.

So last year there were precisely zero actual cases of personation fraud - the only sort of fraud that demanding ID solves. If you want to get serious about abuse of elections then you ned to look at:

1. Voter intimidation especially intimidation of women

2. Postal vote farming made possible by automatic rights to a PV

3. Abuse of political selection processes (in all the main parties)

4. Treating and, let's call it, "extreme creativity" around election expenses

One previously huge abuse - false registration - has largely been dealt with through individual registration rules.

None of this is to say that personation doesn't take place (people with experience of campaigning in places like Bradford or Tower Hamlets will tell you it is commonplace - albeit that the evidence for this is more limited). It remains the case that intimidation, treating and postal vote abuse are far more of a problem. The last is easy to deal with - we just return to a system similar to Blair's reforms - but the wide problem of how people campaign is much more difficult to respond to, which is probably why the simple "show ID" proposal - 'look we're doing something' - was taken.

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Steamrollers for cracking nuts - on demanding ID at polling stations

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The Electoral Commission is suggesting that we should have to show identification in order to vote:

"Looking ahead, the time has come for England, Scotland and Wales to move towards a requirement for voters to produce ID at polling stations. This would strengthen the system and bring Great Britain into line with Northern Ireland and many  countries where this is already in place."

This proposal isn't made because the Electoral Commission has any substantive evidence that personation is a real problem in UK elections merely that there have been lots of complaints and lots of stories about allegations of possible personation (mostly in places with big immigrant populations and especially Pakistani or Bangladeshi Muslim populations).

That there is fraud in our elections is a fact that no-one disputes. However, the real problems don't lie with personation but with voter registration and postal voting - yet the Commission refuses to tighten up postal voting systems. Instead we get demands for ID - another example of how we are no longer a place where the default position is to trust someone, to assume he is telling the truth.

In Bradford we get these complaints of personation at every elections. Typically the anecdotes tell of a young campaigner going to houses of people he knows and having a conversation something like this:

"Hi Auntie, where's uncle?" "He's at the mosque."

"Has he voted yet?" "I don't know - his polling card is on the table"

"I'll take it."

The cards are gathered up and handed over to others to vote - "vote early, vote often" as the saying goes.

I suspect that something like this - or variations on it - does happen but that it is less common than the stories make out. What is interesting is that there hasn't been a prosecution for this sort of personation (as far as I know). There have been prosecutions - some successful - for mishandling postal votes and for abuse of voter registration but these are also rare.

This seems to me a proposal more in response to the cries of foul that political parties in some places routinely throw out when they lose elections. We have a small nut in the form of problems in a few places (and these are about allegations of wrongdoing rather than actual evidence of wrongdoing) to which - for its own convenience - the Electoral Commission proposes to employ a large steamroller in the form of requiring ID.

In the end the truth about voting fraud is this - as the Chair of the Electoral Commission says:

"Proven cases of electoral fraud are rare..."

The response should be for local councils and police in areas where there might be a problem not for national legislation. And certainly not for legislation that institutionalises an assumption of mistrust and especially mistrust based on someone being from an immigrant population.

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