Vote Fraud in Britain

Well, at least the US isn't alone in absentee vote fraud. From John Fund at today's WSJ's Political Diary (May 18, 2010).

. . . election law, which since 2000 has given absentee ballots, or "postal votes," to anyone who asks. Designed to reverse falling turnout in inner cities and student towns, the new rules have instead created a loose system in which one out of five votes are now absentee and cheating may be rampant. Like many states in America, Britain requires no identification to register to vote. The police have launched 50 criminal investigations in Britain to address concerns that electoral rolls have been stuffed with ghost voters, people living overseas or duplicate names. In some areas, a full 8% of mailed-in ballots were found to be invalid.

Much of the vote rigging appears to be in Pakistani and Bangladeshi neighborhoods, where political correctness has discouraged careful attention to fraud. When a journalist from the Independent newspaper went to the town of Bow to investigate the local "biraderi," or brotherhood networks used to mobilize support for candidates, he was brutally beaten by street toughs. Salma Yaqoob, a candidate for the left-wing Respect Party in Birmingham, says the explosion in absentee voting has allowed male relatives of thousands of Asian women in Britain to dictate how they vote.

The Electoral Commission, which acts as a watchdog in British elections, raised the alarm back in 2003 about the fraud risk of increased reliance on mail-in voting. In 2005, a senior judge in Birmingham removed six local Labour Party officials after concluding they had forged 2,500 absentee votes using methods that "would disgrace a banana republic." The next British government will face calls to clean up the postal vote abuses, but there is a lesson for the U.S. here as well. An explosion in absentee voting in the U.S. has produced a growing list of elections tainted by fraud. If voters want the convenience of voting from home, governments must adopt proper safeguards. Otherwise, political hacks who currently have little reason to fear detection or prosecution will become even more brazen.