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7:53am on Thursday, 4th May, 2023:
Anecdote
It's local election day today in the UK. I had a choice between the Conservative candidate and three other candidates who, even if you added all their votes together, still wouldn't get anywhere near as much as the Conservative candidate. I should have taken a die with me and rolled it in the booth, but instead I voted Liberal Democrat as usual because I feel most sorry for them.
For the first time ever, I had to show some personal photo ID to vote. I am very against this concept. It's going to lead to a drop in voter participation, which some future government will use as an argument that not enough people have photo ID therefore we should all be given ID cards. I am not in favour of ID cards at all, as I see them as a way for government (and, worse, companies) to control things they ought not to be controlling.
Unfortunately, the requirement for voter ID will benefit one party or another. When a party is electeed, by definition voter ID will have benefitted them; therefore, they'll keep it. Great.
The flimsy justification for requiring photo ID is to reduce electoral fraud. We have hardly any electoral fraud in the UK — in the local elections last year, there were 193 cases of alleged electoral fraud, leading to one police caution and one case taken to court. Of those 193 cases, only 38 were to do with voting; the rest were mainly to do with campaigning.
Most voting fraud isn't to do with showing up at a polling station and claiming to be someone else anyway. It's to do with postal votes, which of course this whole voter ID concept doesn't address. Yes, you may be able to ensure that the person who requests a postal vote is the person who is sent the form, but you can't ensure that a domineering family member doesn't force them to fill it in a particular way (if indeed they even let them see it).
There's some new kind of software in use this time round. In the past, all ballots had a number on them; now, they have a QR code on them. What used to happen was that you'd be given a ballot paper and the number on it was written down next to your name on the list of people eligible to vote in your ward. Now, it's scanned. Yes, this does mean that there's a way to find out which way you voted. The reason given for this undermining of the concept of the secret ballot was to prevent voter fraud: if you went to vote and found that someone else had already voted in your name, then the errant paper could be retrieved at the count and the correct vote used instead. Clearly, there's no need to do this if voter ID is being used, so why is it still in place? To prevent ballot-box stuffing? If you're going to stuff ballot boxes, you can do that at the end of the day by attributing the to-be-stuffed ballot papers to people who didn't bother to vote.
Official: Do you have a form of photo identification?
Me: Yes.
Official: Good.
Me: Not really.
Still, at least I still get to vote.
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Copyright © 2023 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).