The constituencies in the PCC [Police and Crime Commissioner] elections are big, with over a million voters in some cases. There’s currently no provision for candidates to have Freepost facilities to deliver their election addresses to voters. Nor is there a provision for any sort of booklet for voters that would include candidates’ election addresses. Alongside the PCC elections, of course, there may well be elections for Mayors in the larger English cities. And candidates for Mayor will, on current plans, be able to pay a fee to have their election address included in a booklet delivered to voters across the city. So we’re worried that we’re currently heading for an odd situation, both for candidates and for voters.

A very good point.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

The Liberal Democrats’ biggest donor, who has been on the run for three years after being convicted of a multimillion pound theft, has been arrested by police in the Dominican Republic, the Guardian can disclose…

A City of London police spokesman confirmed Brown’s arrest. “We are pleased to hear that Michael Brown has been detained by authorities in the Dominican Republic, and are currently establishing contact with them to find out further details about his arrest.

“Clearly, at some stage we will look for his return to the UK, so he can serve the sentence for the fraud offences for which he has been convicted in this country,” he said.

As Stephen Tall has previously written:

There have been two investigations by the Electoral Commission into the party’s decision to accept Michael Brown’s donation, in 2006 and again in 2009.

On each occasion, the Commission cleared the party of wrong-doing, ruling that ‘it remains the Commission’s view that the Liberal Democrats acted in good faith,’ and that sufficient checks were carried out by the party and its officers. Let’s remember, it took a lengthy investigation by the Serious Fraud Office to find evidence to convict Mr Brown. Let’s also remember that there were plenty of wealthy businesspeople happy to hand over their cash to Mr Brown in the hope of turning a profit; presumably they too trusted him.

The neglect of the private renter is seen most often when the housing market is discussed, where it is frequently not only taken as a given that home ownership is what it is all about but also very little attention is given to making the private rented sector work better. You can fight through a bulging email folder of press releases from politicians wanting to make mortgages easier, cheaper, safer and more numerous before you find one that talks about tackling any of the issues renters face.

This week has seen the neglect in another form, with the Electoral Commission’s report into electoral registration. The headline picture is fairly straightforward. The evidence, “indicate[s] a decline in the  quality of the registers in the early 2000s with a subsequent stabilisation, but not recovery, from 2006″. Registration rates also vary greatly by age: “The lowest percentage of completeness is recorded for the 17–18 and 19–24 age groups (55% and 56% complete respectively). In contrast, 94% of the 65+ age group were registered”.

However, differences in registration based on class or ethnicity – often talked about – are not only relatively small (little difference based on class, less than 10 percentage points difference based on ethnicity) but they are dwarfed by the property dimension:

Completeness ranged from 89% among those who own their property outright and 87% among those with a mortgage, to 56% among those who rent from a private landlord. In relation to accuracy, the rate of ineligible entries at privately rented properties was four times that found at owner occupied addresses.

For the slump in electoral registration which went alongside the slump in turnout at the turn of the century to have since stabilised as turnout has recovered somewhat is an okay, rather than good, trend. To make it a good trend requires that private renting problem to be fixed.

It is one of the reasons why – done right – I think individual electoral registration is a good thing, as it will then be clearer to people in shared private rented accommodation what needs doing to get on the register and remove the situation I’ve often encountered out on the doorsteps of just one name registered at such addresses – an absent landlord.

Yet its also one of the major issues with electoral registration that gets talked about the least. Let’s hope the latest evidence helps to change that.

Great Britain’s Electoral Registers 2011

As the paper says:

The key issue is that many Returning Officers have considered that increasingly complex election counts would be better conducted the morning after the close of poll when staff are fresh and less likely to make mistakes, while governments, political parties and candidates have often pressed for counts in major elections to take place immediately after the close of polls. This has led to controversies in the public domain ahead of major elections.

Timing of Election Counts: Issues Paper

It’s forthright message, headlined (in capital letters no less): “IMPORTANT RECOMMENDATION TO PARLIAMENT” is that with the legislation not yet passed by Parliament, there will simply not be enough time between it being passed and the proposed first possible local referendum date for the contests to be properly run. Instead, it says implementation should be delayed by a year in order to provide a sufficient gap between legislation and implementation.

This sort of warning by the Electoral Commission has become a regular feature of autumnal politics as governments of different political complexions have pushed through legislation ahead of the following spring. However, in this case their views are being expressed in a particularly strident manner.

That is no doubt due to the fact that the creation of local referendums raises far more issues of administrative organisation than the changes introduced by previous rounds of legislation. In theory, for example, some lucky voters could get to vote in five different referendums on the same day in the spring, with those different referendums taking place across differing organisational boundaries.

Localism Bill: Electoral Commission briefing for Lords Third Reading

As is often the case in such reports, it is the apparently obvious recommendations that highlight how something, somewhere took a rather unfortunate turn. In the case of this report, one such recommendation is tucked way unobtrusively in the middle of p.8:

Following any boundary reviews ROs and EROs must make thorough checks with the relevant Boundary Commission to ensure they are able to precisely identify the exact boundaries that are set out in legislation.

Indeed.

(700 people in Glasgow were sent poll cards telling them to vote in the wrong place.)

On the big issue in many people’s minds ahead of the elections, the report rightly brings good news. The 2007 Scottish elections were marked by controversy over the much higher proportion of rejected ballot papers than for previous Scottish Parliament elections.

This time, aided in part by the use of different ballot paperwork, the rejection rates fell right back down to levels last seen in 1999.

Looking to the future, the paper echoes the Electoral Commission report on the AV referendum when it comes to following up invalid postal votes and also promises a discussion paper on the thorny issue of when elections should be counted.

Scottish Parliament Elections Report – Electoral Commission

10pm cut-off for voting

The report raises again the big administrative fall out from the 2010 general election: the large queues in some places of people still wanting to vote when the polls closed at 10pm. Since May 2010, the Electoral Commission has called for the law to be changed so that people in the queue at 10pm can still vote and this report repeats that call.

However, given the lack of any new problems on this sort in May, it is unlikely to sway the government which has taken the view so far that letting people in a queue still vote simply changes a timing problem (a sharp 10pm cut-off) for a geographic problem (how do you define unambiguously who is in the queue?) – and anyway that the real problems was Returning Officers who planned very badly, being caught out by turnout levels that were not particularly high.

Linking electoral administrators’ pay to performance

The pay for Returning Officers has long been a concern of mine, including the way Returning Officer pay was quietly increased without anyone working out what the bill would be and the way that Returning Officers get paid in full even when they mess up, as happened most spectacularly in Wolverhampton.

The government introduced a modest reform in this area for the referendum with the legislation saying that local administrators would only be paid in full if their performance was up to scratch.

A little disappointingly, the Electoral Commission review does not really look at the impact of this change and therefore missed out on the opportunity to recommend either changes to this performance related pay system or for it to be applied to future elections.

Invalid postal votes

During the referendum, over 300,000 postal votes (around 6% of the total number returned) were disqualified because the paperwork had not been completed correctly. In some cases this will have been a matter of the fraud checks working as they should, such as rejecting a postal vote because a forged signature did not match the original signature on file.

However, the internal evidence from the rejected postal votes plus the lack of other evidence of fraud on this scale strongly suggests that the vast majority of cases were ones of human error by the would-be voter rather than attempted fraud.

Moreover, these figures exclude postal votes which were not counted because the Royal Mail delayed or lost them. Very little in the way of systematic evidence is gathered about how many postal votes are returned too late in the post, which is a shame as it might be a significant issue, particularly in certain parts of the country.

Two steps which could and should be taken are to gather such data and also to look into options for letting electoral administrators follow up after an election invalid postal votes with the voter. This would not only help identify fraud but would also identify those situations where someone has, for example, made a slip of the pen originally giving their date of birth wrong - which means that all subsequent postal votes from them are rejected without them ever knowing.

Although the review is disappointingly silent on the first point, on the second it recommends:

The UK Government should introduce legislation to enable Electoral Registration Officers to request corrected or refreshed personal identifiers from absent voters at any time in addition to the current required five-yearly refresh, and require
Returning Officers to provide information about electors whose postal votes were rejected due to a mismatch of personal identifiers so that Electoral Registration Officers can request corrected or refreshed identifiers or, where necessary, further investigate possible electoral malpractice.

Reporting of donations

One source of controversy during the referendum was the limited amount of information that the campaigns had to publish before, rather than after, polling day about their sources of funding. On this the Electoral Commission recommends:

We recommend that the Government consider the options for an element of prepoll reporting of donations, and introduce a suitable provision for future referendums. Once the loan controls for referendum campaigners are in place, as recommended above, we recommend that such a pre-poll reporting requirement should also apply to loans.

Electoral Commission – Report on the May 2011 Referendum

Good news.

He also reiterated his support for providing returning officers with the necessary resources to check all postal votes in future. (At the moment, the law requires returning officers to check the personal identifiers given on at least 20% of postal votes though many check 100%.) All good news.

UPDATE: To explain in more detail – it is the proposal that people who do not wish to join an electoral register should be given a simple ‘tick-box’ option to avoid being ‘chased up’ during the following 12 months which Nick Clegg was signalling the government would drop once the official consultation closes.

The current electoral registration system is based on one registration form being delivered to each household, with the head of the household completing the form on behalf of everyone there and sending it back (“household registration”).

One reason therefore for switching to individual registration is a point of principle: someone’s ability (if they aren’t the head of a household) to vote shouldn’t be dependent on whether or not someone else has filled in a form for them.

This switch will also reduce the problems with rented property, where in urban areas particularly it is far from rare for electoral registration forms to be filled in with the name of the landlord (only), resulting in those living in a property not being registered and someone who really lives elsewhere being put on the register at that address. It’s regular experience in such areas for political canvassers to call on a house which is clearly occupied by several adults but to see that there is only one name on the electoral register – and to be told it is that of the landlord.

Individual registration will also allow the recording of “personal identifiers” such as signatures. This will in turn make it easier to take (further) action against fraud, either in postal votes or in impersonating someone else at a postal station. These anti-fraud benefits have been regularly mentioned by the Electoral Commission and local government electoral registration staff as a major reason for supporting individual electoral registration.

Postal vote fraud

People already have to give personal identifiers when applying for a postal vote (which are then checked against those given when a postal vote is cast). By adding in a need to give them when you join the electoral register too, it makes one type of postal vote fraud much harder – where you take the names of people on the electoral register who you know are not going to vote (e.g. because they have moved away) and then forge both postal vote applications and subsequent postal votes in their name. Individual registration, however, means you would need to have also faked information when someone joins the register – not impossible, but rather like putting a window lock in at home doesn’t stop the determined burglar but stops some, by extending the number of forgeries required and needing more planning in advance, it makes it harder and therefore should stop some postal vote fraud. It would also mean any forgery requires more organisation and more fake paperwork, raising the chances of forensic evidence being left behind, people talking and so on.

Impersonation at polling stations

Individual registration also would make it possible to tackle the risks of impersonation at polling stations. At the moment, there is relatively little protection against “impersonation” – turning up at a polling station, claiming to be someone else and getting to vote in their name – and political campaigners in some parts of the country fear that it is becoming the new favoured route for fraud. There was a brief, aborted attempt under Labour to try out asking for personal identifiers at some elections, but was abandoned after it was realised that the legislation passed to allow this was faulty.

Possible downsides of individual regsistration

There is a risk that the switch to individual registration will result in fewer people registering – because rather than relying on someone else completing a form, everyone has to fill in their own form. This is what happened initially in Northern Ireland when it made the switch, although registration numbers did then bounce back to a large degree. Quite how far back you think it bounced depends on how many fake electoral register entries you think there were in Northern Ireland before the change, a topic on which there are widely varying views.

There is likely to be a particular issue with universities, where currently the university authorities often automatically register all students who are living in university accommodation. To help deal with this and other issues, the government is currently piloting data-matching exercises which could highlight both likely missing names from the register and also suspicious, possibly fradulent, entries.

For the switch to be a success, it will require a significant publicity campaign, and may well also see political parties start to get more heavily involved in pushing registration than in the past. However, with both we can have a more secure electoral system which, by increasing confidence in our electoral system, also helps increase public involvement in elections.

The piece does not mention making electoral registration voluntary, as that is not a requirement of moving to individual electoral registration. On that topic see my response to the government’s consultation on electoral registration.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the draft legislation which has been published to implement individual electoral registration in Great Britain. The publication of a full draft for public consultation is a very welcome improvement on the way in which some other electoral changes have been handled in recent years.

On the principle of individual electoral registration, I am very supportive of the government’s intention to introduce it. During the years I was attending the Electoral Commission’s Political Parties Panel on behalf of the Liberal Democrats, representatives of all the main parties frequently expressed their support for the principle, so seeing it introduced is a welcome response to those long-standing calls from across the political spectrum and from the independent regulator, the Electoral Commission.

In that respect I agree with Michael Wills, the then Labour Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice, who said in  Parliament on 13 July 2009, “I hope that all Members will agree that this historic shift will enrich our democracy”.

I agree though with the government’s proposal to scrap the intermediary “voluntary individual registration” phrase proposed by Michael Wills as it would have provided an intermediary phase with few of the benefits but many of the costs of a full individual registration scheme.

There are, however, two points of important detail on which I disagree with the government’s proposals.

First, it is proposed to remove the legal requirement to register to vote. I oppose this as a proposal being made at the wrong time, in the wrong way and without full consideration of its impact as key factors are missing from the official Impact Assessment and Cost Benefit Analysis:

1. It is a significant shift in the principle of electoral registration which, regardless of its inherent merits, has not been preceded by the extensive debate, cross-party agreement and Electoral Commission support which the principle of introducing individual registration has.
2. The proposal is not necessary to make individual electoral registration work, and to introduce such a major change of principle at the same time as introducing individual electoral registration risks undermining the primary aim unnecessarily by reducing registration rates at the very time when the switch to individual registration makes maintaining them more challenging.
3. By making electoral registration voluntary, the change would also in effect be making jury service voluntary, given the reliance on the electoral register for jury service. I note the phrase “jury service” does not appear once in Cm 8108: Individual Electoral Registration nor in the accompanying Impact Assessment. If the government is intending to create a new separate system to avoid making jury service voluntary, it is a major flaw in the consultation for it not to be mentioned (and it is hard to see how it can be intending to create such a system without introducing costs which are not mentioned in the official Cost Benefit Analysis). Alternatively, if the impact on jury service has simply not been considered, that in itself would be a major reason to drop the proposal as it means the government’s decision-making process has omitted a significant issue.
4. The Impact Assessment refers to the advantages in fighting crime of an accurate and complete electoral register, yet it does not consider the consequence impediment to fighting crime from voluntary registration reducing the completeness of the electoral register.

In other words, making electoral registration voluntary is not a necessary part of individual registration, has been raised as an idea relatively late in the day and would have important impacts on jury service and crime fighting which are omitted from the official Impact Assessment and Cost Benefit Analysis, as well as not being mentioned in Cm 8108.

The obvious conclusion from that is that this is a rushed proposal that has not been properly considered. The sensible response therefore is to drop it.

The second point on which I disagree is the suggestion that a full annual canvass, with comprehensive door knocking, might not be carried out in 2014, and instead be replaced with a predominantly posted-out system based on records that, as the Impact Assessment itself acknowledges, will contain many errors.

Given both the importance of accurate electoral registers in the run-up to a general election and also the need to communicate with people the changes being introduced, maintaining a full annual canvass in 2014 would bring two major benefits. Moreover, given the risk of a post-general election drop in registration levels in 2015 which then affects the electoral register to be used for the next Parliamentary boundary review, there is a strong case to continue with a full canvass in 2015 and only subsequently review the options for reduced canvassing.

Yours etc.