Local Government Elections

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Greaves knows a great deal about elections and how they are fought and won. We have campaigned together in a number of them for almost exactly 40 years, since he came on behalf of what was then the Association of Liberal Councillors to assist in a couple of council by-elections in Liverpool in October 1977. Around that time, I read all my noble friend’s many booklets about fighting local elections and learned a great deal from them, but I learned nothing about the practices which he has just described. He has raised serious issues about electoral law and what he calls treating, which in plain English we know to be better described as bribing the voters. He rightly says that breaches of the spirit, if not the letter, of the law may occur in any party.

Many years ago, I heard of a branch of the Liberal Party that refused to undertake any of the accepted electioneering methods of canvassing and polling day organisation. Instead, it laid on a huge tea with free refreshments in the village hall on polling day, and it was customary for people to visit it after voting. Whether this affected the results, I do not know, but it should not happen. Electoral law should be more explicit about the provision of refreshment to voters and there should be proper policing action to prevent what appear to be major abuses of the law, as just outlined by my noble friend. Perhaps the Minister could share with us the latest thinking about how the Government may now attempt to implement some of the recommendations outlined in the recent review of election laws by the former chair of the Conservative Party, Sir Eric Pickles, since it first responded last December.

In relation to the overall question, I hope that the Minister will agree that there is not a massive amount of cheating in local elections, or in any form of election, in this country. For my part, I accept that we can act to reduce its prevalence, even if it is small, and that fraud would possibly be more common if it were more widely known how easy it can be. It is also important, however, that any action to prevent or deter electoral fraud is proportionate. We must recognise that any measure which might restrict the capacity of people to vote legitimately must be considered very carefully and be balanced by measures which make it more likely that people who are properly entitled to vote are enabled to do so.

My experience of suspecting personation was when I believed that the Liverpool Militants were undertaking the practice when I organised elections there in the 1980s. I was suspicious because of the way in which I noted that Militant supporters would call at doors and, if anyone said they were not voting, they left immediately without argument—the Militant people tended to be rather argumentative. In contrast, other party workers would plead with such people to turn out and vote. But in those Liverpool elections, turnouts were perhaps high because of the approach of the Militant supporters, as they identified names of people who would not be going to the polling station themselves, who may then have had votes cast on their behalf.

The noble Lord, Lord Alton, then a Liverpool Liberal MP, told me how he saw people going into polling stations apparently with names and addresses written on their wrists. Some years later, the noble Baroness, Lady Gould of Potternewton, told me that her investigation into the Labour Party in Liverpool when she was her party’s national organiser confirmed that personation was indeed the tactic of the Militants.

It seems to me, therefore, that a greater police presence at polling stations would have helped, together with a greater number of staff at the polling stations to ask the questions allowed for by law about whether or not people have voted already or are who they say they are. When I attempted in the Liverpool Walton by-election in 1991 to get presiding officers to ask the statutory questions of people turning up to vote who had died or said that they would not be voting, I was told by the returning officer that he simply did not have the staff to do what was legally required of him when I arranged for our agent to make the formal request for him to do so.

However, I do not believe that these tactics are common. Last year the Electoral Commission identified 19 allegations of personation in the EU referendum, some of which proved not to be personation at all, out of more than 33 million votes cast. This is in line with statistics from other national elections and does not in itself suggest that there is a widespread problem with personation requiring measures which may deter people from voting when they are entitled to do so. Voter identification is required in Northern Ireland in order to deal with problems of personation, and it is said not to have reduced turnout, but political passions run strongly there and such measures are perhaps less likely to deter voters in the Province than in Great Britain.

There should be greater awareness of the penalties for personation, greater police presence at polling stations where it may be suspected, and more resources for presiding officers to ensure that the statutory questions can be put. In this age, it should not be difficult to provide presiding officers with details of people who are known to have died, and if a mistake has been made and a supposedly dead voter turns up, they can be provided with a tendered ballot paper, as happens when a second person tries to claims the same vote as one cast earlier.

If any form of ID is ever required, a suitable form of it must be provided free of charge. If poll cards were sent in unmarked envelopes, they should suffice, because it would be hard to steal such a poll card and then impersonate someone. Lost or stolen poll cards could be reported and anyone seeking to vote on the basis of one could be questioned at the polling station. However, there is a danger that the proverbial sledgehammer is provided for the nut, and I could not consider supporting any measures requiring evidence of ID at polling stations without us also addressing the much bigger issue of the many millions of people missing from the electoral registers.

The Government’s position appears to be that people should have to opt in to the right to vote, despite the fact that Parliament has specifically preserved the principle that failing to co-operate with the electoral registration process can be subject to a fine or civil penalty. You do not have to opt in to the right to benefit from the emergency services, nor from many other things approved by law and provided by government, so you should not have to opt in to being able to vote. If you have the right to vote, the process should be automatic and making it so would be a great improvement to our democracy.

Finally, I raise the issue of postal voting. It seems legitimate to question whether a reason should be provided for voting by post rather than going to a polling station. Some years ago, I was responsible for a change in postal vote regulations requiring that the signature of the voter accompanying the postal vote matched the signature on the form applying for the postal vote. I hope the Minister might look rather more carefully than the Government have so far at seeking to amend the declaration to be signed by the voter.

In my view, the declaration should state that: the ballot paper has been completed only by the person entitled to complete it; that that has been done, together with the sealing of the ballot paper in the envelope provided, in conditions of privacy; that the envelope is being returned directly by that person to a post box, the electoral registration officer or returning officer, or a polling station on polling day; that exceptions to those principles should be made only for people who require assistance from someone such as a carer or as is necessary on grounds of disability; and that, in any event, no candidate or representative of a candidate should be involved in the process of returning ballot papers.