BAD EXAMPLE

by MONITOR
WHAT has Britain in common with Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, Monaco, Russia, Serbia and Ukraine? Only that these countries are under surveillance by the Council of Europe to ensure that their elections are run on a “free and fair” basis and that Britain runs the risk of finding itself among them if it does clean up its postal voting procedures. A team from the Council of Europe plans to visit Britain in December to look into the way in which postal voting is conducted; it will be led by a former German Justice minister and a Polish senator. The alarm bells on Britan's postal voting system began to ring last year after the local council elections when doubts began to be expressed about the vulnerability of the system to vote rigging by false electoral rolls and inadequate supervision by election officers. A police prosecution in Birmingham led to a judge declaring that the conduct of local elections “would disgrace a banana republic”. Since then the government has introduced new legislation to improve procedures but the advice of the independent Electoral Commission is still not being taken by the government. Postal voting does improve the generally low participation in elections but that is nothing to be proud of if better turn-out is achieved only at the price of fraud at the polls. Britain is often critical of election methods in other countries and should be sure it has no flaws in its own arrangements.