Bluemerle

*Votes scandal puts Britain in the dock over human rights*
By Dominic Kennedy

BRITAIN is to be investigated for the first time by the Council of
Europe for alleged human rights breaches because of concerns over postal voting fraud.

Scandals arising from Tony Blair’s strategy to improve turnouts by
giving everybody the right to vote by post risk placing Britain in the same league as newly toppled dictatorships.

Bridget Prentice, the Constitutional Affairs Minister who has just
steered an anti-fraud Bill through Parliament, reacted angrily, saying that the move was unnecessary, unwarranted and unfair.

The Council of Europe was created in 1949 as a postwar bulwark against communism, with Britain among the ten founders. Today it brings together 46 nations from Iceland to Russia. Much of its work involves supporting ex-communist states to introduce democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

The fact-finding team will begin by visiting London to meet officials
and may tour voterigging hotspots such as Birmingham and Coventry.

Herta Däubler-Gmelin, a former German Justice Minister and socialist MP, and Urszula Gacek, a centre-right Polish senator, have been appointed to conduct the inquiry. They are expected to arrive in December ready for a decision in the spring.

Holding free elections is an obligation for council members. The final straw for Britain was the decision by a judge last year that widespread voterigging by Labour in Birmingham’s local elections “would disgrace a banana republic”.

David Wilshire, a Tory MP on the council’s assembly, persuaded
centre-right and liberal parliamentarians from across Europe to demand an inquiry.

In a motion they complained of “the growing body of evidence that
widespread absent vote fraud is taking place in the UK”. Such cheating would breach the European Convention on Human Rights, which requires nations to “hold free elections . . . which will ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature”.

Mr Wilshire, a former Home Office ministerial aide, said yesterday: “As we spend a lot of time telling other people they have to keep the conventions, it is important we should do so as well. It would be quite something if the UK found itself in the company of places like Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Ukraine, which have been severely criticised.”

The team hopes to meet the Government, political parties, the
independent Electoral Commission, Electoral Reform Society and Hansard Society.

The council can require Britain to take action to protect human rights and the country may be placed under constant monitoring. Italy is under similar investigation because of Silvio Berlusconi’s control of electronic media.

Chris Ruane, the Labour MP for Vale of Clwyd, urged the team to look
also at the voters missing from the roll. “Postal voting fraud is
totally unacceptable but it is also totally unacceptable to have up to 3 million people missing off the register,” he said.

# Postal vote-rigging scandals have allowed Europe’s last dictatorship to embarrass Britain in another international forum, The Times has learnt. Belarus, where leaders opposing Alexander Lukashenko have been known to vanish or die, challenged Britain at a meeting of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. “Our delegation is concerned about the current postal voting system in the UK, in which there exists a potential risk of violations of the principle of equal elections and of extensive abuses,” Belarus said.

dkennedy@thetimes.co.uk

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...409486,00.html

Aardvark

It's about time too. We are too complacent about our electoral system. I'm privileged to have been to several countries as an international election observer and it angers me that Lukashenko, whose election I observed, has ammunition with which to berate us. We have a lot to offer other countries, but we also have a lot to learn.

I'm surprised that the complaint is coming through the CE, rather than the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, as it is the OSCE which has done more for democratisation in Europe and it is the OSCE that provides election observation missions within the OSCE region - 56 countries including USA and Canada.

Lukashenko is a fine one to talk - go to www.osce.org/odihr and seek out the final report on Belarus.

Bluemerle

UKIP would get a lot of support if it said it would ban postal votes except for sickness and holidays, like it used to be.

brian pearson

If you can't be arsed to walk to the polling station every few years then you don't deserve the vote. Voting online, by text etc is trendy nonesense ripe for fraud.