Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I shall be brief, but I want to raise an issue that has troubled me in the past.

The noble Lord will see that the form for a postal vote—form 2—is prescribed on pages 60 and 61 of the Bill. I should say that he might need some advice from his civil servants because I have never had a clear answer to this question. The form requires the person who wants to use a postal vote to fill in the boxes set out in the form. After the individual has filled in their date of birth in one place, a box is provided for the voter’s signature. Next to that box, it says:

“(voter’s signature) IMPORTANT—Keep signature within border”.

That has always troubled me because many people who vote by post are actually old and infirm, and I have never been quite sure what happens if their signature goes outside the box.

In a sense this is not a minor point because I wonder whether that means that the vote may not be counted, which is what happens if you make other mistakes or put wrong entries on the form, or whether it simply means that the signature may not be able to be read by electronic means. I have always assumed that the reason for keeping the signature within the box is so that it can be read electronically. That might not be right, so if it is not, I am not sure why it is so important for the signature to be kept within the border.

I emphasise the point because I am thinking of the comments made earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Low. I know that you can get a dispensation for this and you do not have to vote this way, but for elderly and infirm people, or for those whose vision is not as good as it was, there is a real problem about staying within the box—indeed, I have been known to stray outside the box once or twice in my career, but not too often.

Again, I know that the Minister may have to take advice on this, but what happens if a voter filling in a form for a postal vote does not keep the signature within the parameters of the box? Is the problem simply that the signature cannot be read electronically but the vote will still be counted because someone will read it manually, or does it mean that the vote will not be counted? Obviously this question does not just apply to this form, but to others as well.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, I agree strongly with the comments made by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours. While it may not be appropriate to deal with the issue in this Bill, the provision of an adequate number of polling stations ought to be of great concern to the Government. I am lucky because the polling station is in the street where I live, but that is not the case for a lot of people, who have to travel many miles to get to their polling station. The Government ought to look at that problem. At some point in the future—obviously not now—there is a case for a proper revision of electoral law in this country so that it can be brought together for the production of some sort of consolidated Bill.

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke]

My Lords, I speak in the debate on whether Schedule 2 should stand part of the Bill not from a passionate objection to anything in the schedule but as a means of impressing on the Leader of the House the importance of these paragraphs. This is the bit where we should be able to transcend party politics. This has been a closely fought part of our legislative process, but at the end of the day the reality is that, for the referendum to have real value and merit in the development of our constitution, people need to feel confident that it has been conducted in such a manner, and the rules of the legislation have been applied in such a way, that they can relax not only from a partisan point of view but from a citizen’s point of view. I urge the Leader of the House, who is a reasonable man, to look at these issues as someone who just wants a proper result for the referendum.

There is a strong case for all the parties represented in this House to get together to discuss these nuts-and-bolts issues. I remember with some pain Scotland’s 1979 referendum, which is an experience that I would not wish to repeat. Earlier I spoke to the noble Lord, Lord McCluskey—who, sadly, is not in his place at the moment—who was talking about some of the pressures that he experienced as a Minister in the Government at that time when looking at how the referendum should be run. There are no two ways about it: there will be huge divisions in every party. That means that the parties must be confident in the structures that exist.

--- Later in debate ---

I finish by making the point, yet again, that we would not need polling stations at all as such, and that people would be able to vote anywhere, if we had electronic voting by using ID cards. Indeed, although the Government got rid of ID cards because they said that those were so expensive, if we look at the uses that could be made of an ID card we would actually save money in the long run by having them for everybody.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, I am a bit surprised by the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. I have a list here that I got from the Printed Paper Office. Even by my calculations, we have actually got through a majority of the groups for today. I understand that we will finish this Committee stage tomorrow and I cannot see any problem with that whatever. Secondly, on the question of schools, although I heard the comments from my noble friend Lord Myners, we should be looking to get out of using schools as polling stations completely, if we possibly can. That would avoid children losing a day in school.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, there is one problem with this schedule, which I want to refer to briefly. I am sure that it will make us wonder, in the light of us looking at it in some detail, whether there perhaps should have been one or two amendments, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said, I think wrongly, that there had been no discussions on this schedule at all.

The real problem with this schedule is that we can sense in it that the parliamentary draftsmen—whom I do not blame, as it is a very difficult job—think that it is about the procedure relating to any election. The whole point is that this is not any election. It is fundamentally different, so far as the voter going into the polling booth is concerned, from all the elections that he or she is familiar with, where they know that there will be names there and have, obviously, put their cross by the favoured candidate. However, this is about asking a question and it will not do, for a number of reasons, simply to lift huge chunks that are clearly from existing legislation—I do not blame the draftsmen, as I have said—about the conduct of elections, thinking, “Well, we can just lift this and stick it in and this will be okay for a referendum to change the constitution”.

I shall give one example. I do not know the answer to it but it is quite significant. A relatively small part of this schedule has the totally innocuous information about the,

“appointment of presiding officers and clerks”.

We all know the job of a clerk in a polling station, but I submit to the Committee that in a referendum on changing the voting system, that clerk is likely to be presented with difficulties that clerks in polling stations simply do not face. The elector will go in, thinking that he or she is voting principally for a local government candidate. Certainly, in the areas that I am familiar with, it is on who should be their local councillor. They will then be presented with a second ballot paper which will ask the question:

“At present, the UK uses the ‘first past the post’ system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the ‘alternative vote’ system be used instead?”.

I put it to the Committee that many people will be going into a polling station for the first time. I am not patronising people or saying the electorate do not understand these systems, I am simply making the straightforward point that the change in the electoral system to the alternative vote system is not high on people’s radar, as we all know from our own experience. I would be very surprised indeed if no more than one elector then left the cubicle where they were about to vote and asked the clerk who distributed the ballot papers what they were being asked to vote on. That is perfectly plausible and indeed an almost inevitable consequence of what is happening.

I asked the question—I do not know the answer—whether it is within the law for the clerk to give advice to the would-be voter about what the alternative vote system is. I assume it probably cannot be because presumably I could be a clerk if I applied to be one and I know what I would tell them about the alternative vote system. So presumably it would be completely out of order for clerks to give advice in that way. If that is the case and a confused elector goes to the clerk on desk and says, “I am puzzled about this second ballot paper, I understand the first one”, at the very least I would suggest that in the appointment of clerks and counting officers on page 33 a script should be offered to them out of courtesy. They would need to know what to say to someone who came to them with that question.

I doubt whether the Leader of the House when he sums up will have given any thought to this as it is only a small part of the Bill but it illustrates the point that you simply cannot lift the rules that apply to every other kind of election and apply them to this most fundamentally important election of changing the way we vote and thereby changing our constitution. So please can we be told whether there is any law relating to what clerks can do when faced with this question? If there is not, should there be or, at the very least, should there be guidance as to what should happen in the polling station when this kind of eventuality arises?