Updates

Election fraud

Further to ‘How to fix an Election’ in Lobster 43, more news on the gentle art of perfuming a skunk.

First Pick Your Voters

Some strong contenders here. But first out of the hat is the Labour Party for performance during the all-postal voting experiments that were tried across the country in the May local council elections. All-postal may have increased turnout to 60 per cent, but it is a fixer’s paradise. Lord Greaves (Lib Dem) told the Upper Chamber that some applications for postal votes in his old stamping ground of Pendle, Lancashire, had resulted in 982 voting papers being sent to ‘a number of central addresses, which turned out to be the addresses of close relatives of Labour candidates or the addresses of known [Labour] party activists. The votes were then delivered, if at all, to the electors by some of those people at a time and in a manner of their choosing.’ (1)

Carol Passmore, a retired nurse aged 54, answered her doorbell and found herself confronted by a Labour activist armed with her vote, which – along with 29 others – had been sent to a house several streets away, the house of a Labour candidate’s cousin. Ms Passmore was then asked to fill in her vote in front of the stranger: ‘I thought a postal vote came to your house and you did it privately […] He was looking over my shoulder while I was doing it. I won’t vote again.’ And as for the idea that she had asked for her vote to be sent to an unfamiliar address in the first place: ‘I’m not that daft – it’s my vote.’ In other cases, at least 60 votes went to two houses in Rochdale, and 45 votes were sent to the home of a Labour candidate’s brother-in-law. Labour won the election by a few hundred votes.

Mohammed Iqbal, deputy leader of the local council’s Labour group (and named as witness on 96 ballots) claimed that such tales were circulated by the disgruntled losers, and that Labour had simply been ‘pro-active’ about gathering postal votes: ‘We don’t play Mugabe-style politics in this country.’ (2)

If you can’t steal them, invent them

In June, Amicus union official Roger Maskell, London and south-east regional secretary of the AEEU section, resigned after making a bungled attempt at tampering with computer files in order to hide a ‘flying voter’ scam. In April, three officials of the AEEU section of the Amicus union – Geoff Saunders, Rob Johnston, Stuart Wallis (a fourth has escaped naming) – had confessed to double-voting for joint general secretary Sir Ken Jackson in Amicus’s February election. They had been switched from one branch to another after the election was called, and had voted at each, as the computer records showed. Sir Ken was praised by Tony Blair in a video distributed to the union, and was endorsed by Gordon Brown over lunch at an Amicus AEEU conference in Blackpool. Under Sir Ken, lest we forget, Amicus had donated £2m to Labour’s 2001 election fund. (3)

Meanwhile, interesting news in May from Bedford, where voter Jonathan Stewart received a phone call from the current occupant of his previous address and found that he had received a second polling card. He decided to test whether this meant that he could vote in two wards in the local council elections, and found that he could (although he decided not to). The confusion was blamed on Stewart’s completion of a form to join his new ward. While the form to be added to the correct register specifically asked for previous address within the last three months, Stewart had moved from Shakespeare road in the Harpur ward, to Queen’s Park ward, nine months previously. He therefore did not state his Shakespeare Road address. Meanwhile, the current occupant of Stewart’s old flat did not register to vote, and so his old application was kept live, ‘to avoid’, in the conscientious words of a borough council spokesman, ‘disenfranchising an elector.’ Stewart’s middle initial ‘A’ was, claimed the council, present on his old registration, but not his new one, resulting in software failing to identify the duplication.

Stewart was not impressed, pointing out that ‘I always fill in my full name on forms and if it appeared in one place with one of my middle initials, and in another without, I suggest that is because those inputting the names on the computer do so inconsistently […] If I could have voted twice, I wonder if any others were in the same position.’ (4) No similar clones spoke out in the following weeks, but as in all such cases, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Also in Bedford: the October mayoral election, which saw a landslide win for Better Bedford Independent candidate Frank Branston, was notable for the extreme dirtiness of the campaigns fought by the three main political parties. Someone abused 5,000 of the Lib Dems’ freepost envelopes, running up a huge bill for the party, while Labour stiffed their own candidate by telling supporters to vote Lib Dem in an ‘anyone but Branston’ tactic. Bedford Borough Council has been hung for 14 years, with the local economy gasping while reserves of over £14m sit in the bank and councillors meet in secret to plan their next jaunt to Europe. Some 4,500 voters applied for postal votes in the run-up to the election, but only 2,000 postal ballots actually turned up at the count.(5) A recount was ordered when 19 ballots went missing during the count itself. You might think that, but I could not possibly comment.

Bring Out Your Dead

A classic move here from Arthur Scargill, who won the vote to decide on the Honorary President of the National Union of Mineworkers in Barnsley this January. Scargill – due to retire in June – received 70 per cent of the vote (the winning post was at 66.6 per cent), meaning that he will remain figurehead of the union until 2011. An undisclosed number of those voting for Scargill were unable to attend the voting in person, being busy pushing up daisies and feeding worms at the time.

Their appearance on voting rolls meant that their votes were still valid, and ‘proxy’ votes were cast in their absence. Scargill admitted that ‘I have not broken any rules, but used the admitted membership, according to the law.’ Jacky Thompson said: ‘He should at least have gone to the families ask them first [sic]. It would be common courtesy.’ No news on how The Sunday Telegraph came by this scandalous little story. (6)

Blind them with Science

In Bedford’s mayoral election, there was an official turnout of 25.39 per cent. The true turnout was nearer 27.5 per cent, but a new ‘second preference’ voting system was apparently beyond nearly 1,000 voters who accidentally spoiled their ballots in a variety of ways, the most stupid of which was putting crosses in the boxes containing the names and party logos rather than in the appropriate (and clearly labelled) voting columns. Witnessing this inspired an unworthy thought: an enterprising canvasser could target certain voters with misinformation about how to mark the paper and further whittle down his opponent’s turnout in an almost untraceable way. Just a thought.

In Birmingham, an inquiry has begun after ‘numerous allegations of voter intimidation and fraud’ during the local council elections. The inner-city ward of Aston saw 981 people apply for postal votes, 750 of them in the final 24-hour period before the application deadline. Aston has a large Pakistani and Bangladeshi population, and low English-language literacy meant that many of the declarations of identity that must accompany a postal vote were simply – and possibly conveniently – signed with a cross.

The intimidation trick is never far behind a ‘Blind Them With Science’ tactic, and Aston was no exception. Parveen Begum, 51, claimed that postal votes in the names of her family were brought to her Aston home by activists who pressured her to vote for Labour candidate Saeed Ahmed: ‘They wanted me to vote for Saeed. They came to my house three or four times. My husband argued with them. It’s wrong. Next time, I won’t do it.’ Her son Shehzad clarified the matter: ‘I came home from work one evening. This lady was there, she’s my mum’s friend. They asked us to sign the declarations. I can’t remember who I voted for.’

(Mohammed Safdar, on the other hand, was visiting family in Pakistan at the time of the election, but council records show that a postal vote was requested in his name while he was away).

John Hemming, the council’s Lib Dem leader, was unhappy: ‘What’s the point in being involved in politics if it’s all fiddled? You might end up in a situation where the biggest crook wins.’ Ahh, bless him! (7)

Garrick Alder

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McKinney

In Lobster 42 (p. 41) and 43 (p. 25) I referred to the black radical Congresswoman, Barbara McKinney, (Democrat, Georgia), who was the first major American politician to raise questions about 9/11. In the piece in 43 I ended by saying, ‘Talking like that in the rabid climate of the US at the time took some courage – and a safe seat!’

Evidently her seat wasn’t so safe, for McKinney lost the primary election and she will not be a Democratic candidate for Georgia. The primary contest was the subject of considerable media attention and McKinney was repeatedly portrayed as a supporter of terrorism, relying on Arab money. The story at <www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/baroneweb/mb_020820.ht> gives a flavour of the campaign: McKinney accused of being a terrorist and of receiving lots of Arab money; her opponent receiving Jewish money.

Dead whales

In Lobster 43 I reported the arrival of a new naval sonar system and anxieties among naturalists that it would damage the ears of whales and other aquatic mammals. The system has been deployed – and the dead whales are starting to be washed up. After a NATO naval exercise off the Canary Islands, which included a US frigate which specialises in anti-submarine warfare, 17 whales washed up on the coast of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote this week. (‘Nato blamed for dead whales’, Ted Harrison, The Guardian 28 September 2002.) The sonar system was given the go-ahead and the US Navy has been given a five-year exemption from the Marine Mammal Protection Act. (‘Navy Cleared To Use a Sonar System Despite Fears for Whales’ at
< www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1010-2002Jul15.html >)

Ransome SIS not KGB

In in ‘Great Northern? Was the author of Swallows and Amazons a Soviet Secret agent?’,(8) Andrew Rosthorn rebutted the charge made by Professor Christopher Andrew, that Ransome had been a Soviet agent. The story took another strange turn when York Membery revealed in The Observer 21 July 2002, ‘Swallows, Amazons and secret agents’, that not only had Ransome not been a Soviet agent, he had been an SIS agent.

Radar and cancer

In Lobster 43, p. 18, I commented:

‘…there is considerable anecdotal evidence that radar operators, for example, suffer higher than normal rates of cancer’ and suggested that one of the reasons that health hazards of mobile phones are being minimised is ‘the legal ramifications in this area are enormous and potentially both very expensive for states using the technology and with very awkward implications for policy.’

Looking for something else I found a cutting in my files, ‘Radar kills 8 scientists’, from the now defunct Today of 24 March 1989, which began: ‘Eight scientists at a secret government base have died of brain tumours. New radar trials using deadly microwaves have been halted.’

The ‘ramifications’ I referred to above have begun to appear in public. In October Newsday magazine reported the filing of a class-action lawsuit by German soldiers suffering from cancer against the American manufacturers of radar equipment. This one, as the cliché has it, is going to run and run. < http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-germany-us-radar-victims10 09oct08,0,6890601.story >

The Sun 8 October 2002 devoted its front page and two inside pages to the discovery that mobile phone transmitters are being hidden in the price signs of garage forecourts. Having screamed ‘Hidden phone masts shock’ on the front, on p. 13 there was a little paragraph giving the official line that there is no danger.

The New Scientist, 24 October 2002, carried the story, ‘Cancer cell study revives cellphone safety fears’, which began: ‘The safety of cellphones has been brought into question once again by research that suggests radio waves from the devices could promote the growth of tumours.’ This is on the Net at < www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992959 >

Notes

1 Michael White and Anne Perkins: ‘Peer warns postal vote system open to fraud’; The Guardian 22 May 2002

2 Jeevan Vasagar: ‘Rigging doubts over postal votes’; The Guardian 28 September 2002

3 Kevin McGuire: ‘MSF asks for “vote-rigging” answers’; The Guardian 24 April 2002; ‘Union officials admit double vote scam’; The Guardian 25 April 2002; ‘Union official quits in vote rigging row’; The Guardian 12 June 2002

5 Private information

6 Rajeev Syal, ‘Scargill admits using votes of the dead in ballot win’, The Sunday Telegraph, 27 January 2002

7 Vasagar, see note 2.

8 https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/article/issue/30/great-northern-was-the-author-of-swallows-and-amazons-a-soviet-secret-agent/

9 http://www.kimsoft.com/1997/us-germy.htm