Clause 3 - Absent votes and declarations of identity
Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Bill
6:15 pm
Mr Crispin Blunt (Reigate, Conservative)
In the course of the interventions that the Minister has been good enough to take, we have covered many of the issues. However, he has failed to convince me of the merits of the case. We are dealing with the suggestion that a political party with access to resources and manpower and a high level of organisation deliberately goes about stealing votes, and that the route that it uses is the application for the absent vote. If we in this Committee do not put sufficient obstacles in the way of people who want to behave like that, we will have failed in our duty to make the electoral process as fair as we reasonably can.
At the moment, in order not to have absent votes checked, it is sufficient to pile in 5,000 at the last moment following a photocopy of the correct form as issued by the electoral officer. The electoral office is unable to check 5,000 absent vote applications at once with the technology that it has. If it becomes clear that that practice is no longer good enough—because a photocopy of the form will be whistled through a computer and all the data will be checked to make sure that the absent vote application is in order—and that the way to put an obstacle in the way of the chief electoral officer is to get supporters who are going after votes to complete forms that are deliberately different from those issued by the chief electoral officer, that is the route that will be taken by those engaged in organised defrauding of the electoral process through applications for absent voting.
Can the Minister explain why we are going to allow that opportunity? We do not need to. The problem could be addressed by the Government's accepting the amendments. In proposing the amendments, we have accepted that it is possible for the political parties to help to administer the process and to try to meet the need for as many people as possible to be registered. However, if the information is not on a form that is bar-coded or identified in some way by the electoral officer, we are leaving open the opportunity for parties, in Northern Ireland in this instance, to engage in organised defrauding of absent votes. One can see a loophole forming. We should now move to close it.