Clause 2 - Pilot order
European Parliamentary and Local Elections (Pilots) Bill
10:30 am
Mr Christopher Leslie (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Constitutional Affairs; Shipley, Labour)
Amendments Nos. 49 and 57 would expand the anti-fraud measures that the piloting order could include, and would ensure that local authorities assist the Electoral Commission in the inspection of
ballot papers and so on to check for personation and evidence of fraud.
I am already well aware that there is a widespread desire that we eliminate the opportunities for fraud, personation and malpractice. We must take those issues exceptionally seriously. We discussed many of them on Second Reading, and have added two clauses, which we shall discuss later, to improve security. They will lengthen the time limit for prosecution for malpractice and extend the offence of personation to outside the polling station. I hope that the Committee will welcome those steps.
Other security measures are desirable, but they can be introduced without primary legislation. Much can be done through the piloting order or other secondary legislation, such as making provision for water marks and the under-printing of ballot papers to ensure that they cannot be replicated. There is no need for extra powers to bolster measures that can already go into the piloting order. Clause 10(2) allows for the piloting order to cover consequential matters in respect of anti-fraud measures, reflecting the change in the electoral mechanism, and there are sufficient anti-fraud measures within electoral law to ensure that postal voting can be undertaken with confidence and that it is no more prone to fraud than conventional voting methods.
Amendment 57 is not necessary. The Bill is already sufficiently explicit in that clause 4(3) says that the local authority should give the Electoral Commission any assistance that it might reasonably require, and clause 4(6) states that the Electoral Commission's report must include an assessment of the incidence of malpractice, personation or other offences.
The hon. Members for Mid-Dorset and North Poole and for Surrey Heath touched on a number of points, which were also raised by the Electoral Reform Society in its submissions to Committee members, regarding previous pilots at local authority level and those who supply e-voting software. The Government have used a variety of methods to investigate fraud—we do not look at reports and allegations about fraud only when they are brought to our attention, we proactively test whether systems are prone to malpractice or fraud. For example, the Electoral Commission, returning officers and others contact people who are shown on the marked register to have voted to question whether they actually cast their votes. We check samples of signatures given on declarations of identity to see whether they match those on record. We review the logs produced by the electronic voting system to identify suspicious activity, such as large numbers of votes from a single server, and we have used quality assurance experts to explore the risks arising from different voting technologies. The Electoral Commission evaluates all the aspects of the pilots, as it has in the past.
The hon. Member for Surrey Heath echoed the comments of the Electoral Reform Society about how the identity details that are sent out for the purposes of e-voting might be made secure. It is important to strike the right balance between security and usability and convenience. We do not want to make it so difficult and complex that voters are completely put off. The
purpose of the changes is, after all, to make voting easier and more convenient. I hope that the Committee will see that a balance needs to be struck. We must consider not only the costs but the administrative and bureaucratic obstacles that would be put in place for returning officers by continual triple or quadruple checking mechanisms. However, it is fair to ask for countermeasures against fraud. In previous pilot schemes, identification numbers were printed on secure stationery, similar to the way in which banks mail personal identification numbers to their customers, so that any tampering with the numbers is obvious.