I've had a quick read of the two voting 'strings' on the forum about who and why you are going to vote for, and wondered if i am the only one that noticed the end of the secret and openly fair ballot.
1. We can no longer stand outside the voting station counting how many people voted. (not voting is an option, especially at general election where a certain proportion of the voting public have to cast a vote for it to be valid, - plus you can see if 3 people went in and 300 votes registered)(the reason for this alternate way of voting was because of falling numbers of votes). and then watch the boxes opened and counted, without them disapearing into the postal system and then into a room in the local government system before magically appearing on the 10th to be counted.
2. There are so many ways of 'rigging' this type of in house voting, compared to the voting station, it's not surprising the politicians introduced it.
3. My ballot is no loger secret as i have to send in signed id along with my ballot paper. (I may or may not trust the moderator, but i dont trust the politicians and their subordinates).
One more 'right' lost to the powers that be.

As a footnote: what is to stop me picking a name from the phonebook as my witness and signing for them?

I’m not here to defend postal voting but some of your concerns are easy to address.

1. Who in their right mind stands outside polling stations except political activists? These same activists, from most of the parties, were also the ones who watched the boxes being opened. The ballot papers will not magically appear on the 10th. The envelopes are being opened throughout the 2 weeks preceding the 10th and the verification statements removed in front of witnesses from any party who choose to attend. The envelopes containing the ballot papers remain sealed until the 11th. They are then transported to Ponds Forge were they will be opened throughout the day on Friday 11th, again witnessed by representatives from all the parties.
2. For every way of rigging a postal ballot there are an equal number of ways of rigging a conventional ballot.
3. Your id is kept separate from the ballot paper, see above.

Footnote: Nothing to stop you from witnessing your own paper. The requirement to have your id witnessed was not part of the original bill as passed by parliament but was added by the House of Lords for some reason.

I hope that allays some of your concerns.

mmm having sent it off i cant check, but i'm fairly sure you did have to have the ballot witnessed by someone else - someone who could have been a 4year old child madly, but not quite as mad as you suggest max

As to being able to check who voted what - that was always possible anyway, should people want to. The number of your ballot paper is/was scribbled onto the roll held in the polling station, to avoid multiple-voting, technically. many are the stories of how votes for the Communist Party were traced back thru those very numbers.

Also, there does appear to have been far larger attempts at carrying out fraud in these elections - the Lib-dem in Oldham(?) and Labout & the PJP in Brum today. It's a farce really.

Originally posted by commie pig
mmm having sent it off i cant check, but i'm fairly sure you did have to have the ballot witnessed by someone else - someone who could have been a 4year old child madly, but not quite as mad as you suggest max

Sorry, didn't mean you were allowed to witness your own paper, just that there is no way of checking whether anyone has done that.

aah, right. with you.

The old system was not perfect. Individual papers could theoretically be traced back to individuals. I could turn up to vote pretending to be someone else, and there were other frauds. Individuals involved in the count could deface a few papers making them spoiled votes, insignificant if the winner had a large majority but sometimes differences are down to single figures.

Introduction of a new system was an opportunity to use technology to improve the security of the vote. It has been implemented in such a way as to achieve the exact opposite. Worse, it makes pretences at being secure - like the utterly worthless witness declaration. What proportion of the witness statements are being validated?

Are any checks being made between the votes cast and the registrar's office to see how many people who died in the last few months still managed to vote? Technically not difficult but to do so would expose the fallacy of it being a secret ballot. Old people's homes have always been a target for candidates, of course the old biddys would vote for the nice young gentleman who was so kind as to mini-bus them to the polling station. It just got easier for the nice young man, he just has to offer to "help them with that complicated paperwork", or an employee at the home could intercept all the ballot papers and pass them on in bulk if nobody notices their non-arrival.

The new system has everything recorded by bar codes so to trace which way I voted could easily become a quick database lookup rather than having to dig through a pile of scrappy little bits of paper. If I can collect other people's blank papers there is nothing to prevent me completing a few dozen. Under the old system, if I had showed up at the school hall 10 times each time purporting to be a different person I'd stand a good chance of being spotted.

We are at the mercy of the postal system. If it failed to deliver a ballot paper to me I could ask for a replacement (if there was time and if I realised what the deadlines were and if I knew how and where to ask). Under the old system, I could just turn up at the polling station whether I'd received my voting notification or not.

But what if the postal system fails to deliver my completed voting paper? Just imagine there is a post office worker emptying pillarboxes, he decides the voters of Dore are overall inclined to differ from his personal political beliefs, it would be so easy to spot those large distinctive envelopes and consign a few dozen to the dustbin. Can I check that my vote has reached the tellers?

electoral fraud stories:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3771083.stm
http://stolenvotes.org.uk/