Clause 6 - Personation: arrestable offence
European Parliamentary and Local Elections (Pilots) Bill
4:15 pm
Mr Teddy Taylor (Rochford and Southend East, Conservative)
That is what I am hoping to do, Mr. Cook, but I am scared that it will have a horrible impact and stop discussion of things that are terribly important. That should worry us; it is certainly not the fault of Conservatives, as hardly any of them are here. There is a big problem, which I hope we shall face up to.
The first question we must ask is simple: will there be more scope for people to cheat in the pilot schemes than in the existing scheme? The answer must certainly be yes. The Liberal Democrats tabled new clauses 2 and 4, which show that they are trying to identify ways in which cheating could be controlled. Although I appreciate that many hon. Members represent nice residential areas with big houses, in Southend-on-Sea there are many homes in multiple occupation. Some of them are frightening places; I went recently to a six-bedroom house where 16 people were staying. There are many retirement homes in my constituency and a lot of bed-and-breakfast hotels; one on the seafront in Southend is called the Palace hotel, but it is neither a palace nor an hotel. It has lots of rooms on five storeys, and many people live there.
The scope for fiddling will increase dramatically if, instead of people going to vote or applying for a postal vote as they do now, the Post Office brings a flood of papers for all the people living in a place. Even in a
house where only five adults live, there will be five lots of ballot papers.
I appreciate that three quarters of the people will probably not bother to vote in European elections because they think that they do not matter, but some people are fanatical about politics. We would be misleading ourselves if we did not accept that a tiny minority passionately want to vote in European elections and they will have greater scope under the proposed arrangement for cheating by filling in a form and voting for someone else. That should worry us a great deal.
What can we do about it? We can keep the present system, whereby the person concerned is reported and has to appear before nice magistrates, who are decent and honourable people who try to be kind to everyone and like to take all the circumstances into account. They may say that the person cheated because he was old, or had had a drink and so on, so they will try to make provision for him. However, when new arrangements are introduced that will extend the scope for cheating immensely, there should be a firm, decisive, clear penalty that says that people who vote for someone else in any circumstances should go to prison for a month. That will affect their career prospects. Some will say that that is not right, because circumstances vary, but unless the measure is accepted, there will be terrible problems caused by people cheating, as many will come before the courts.
It is not just postal voting that will cause those problems. I wish the Government had time to say something about electronic voting because it is one of the most ridiculous pieces of nonsense there has ever been. I am suspicious of electronic things—computers and so on—and my children say that I should learn more about them. However, the scope for cheating in electronic voting is frightening, and unless something is done to try to stop it, there will be terrible problems.
The organisations that are looking at democracy and voting think electronic voting is nuts, silly and expensive and that it should not happen. The Government, however, will introduce it anyway, along with postal voting.