Electoral Ommission

A really hard-hitting report about the failure of the Electoral Commission to get to grips with administrative bungling, fraud and blatent “looking the other way” to avoid responsibility. This 60 page report makes frightening reading about a subject we already find worrying enough with a Chief Executive who reports to himself not being at all worried that he lost 6,000 plus voters at the European Elections and finding Parliamentary scrutiny about it an irritation.

Fortunately, he does not have to worry about local scrutiny as the Overview and Scrutiny committee majority party members agreed to do what he said and refuse to deal with the matter – on the casting vote of its majority party Chairman.

Here is its introduction:

“This study reviews progress seven years after the Committee on Standards in Public Life’s 2007 Report and poses five main questions:

How inaccurate is the electoral register? To what extent is administrative failure responsible for any inaccuracies that occur?

What is the extent of voting fraud in the UK?

Has the Electoral Commission implemented the main recommendation of the
Committee on Standards in Public Life, that the Electoral Commission should focus on administering elections rather than policymaking and on promoting participation?

Are the delays being considered by the Electoral Commission in implementing individual voter registration and in introducing the requirement for voter identification at polling stations justified and acceptable?

Are measures being taken by the Cabinet Office to improve the accuracy of the electoral registers for the May 2015 General Election adequate?

The four main conclusions of this report are:

The administration of elections in the UK remains dangerously inefficient and seriously open to fraud.

There remains within the various bodies responsible for electoral administration a culture of complacency and denial.

The Electoral Commission has taken too few meaningful steps to address the recommendation of the Committee on Standards in Public Life that it focus on its regulatory role.

There is an emerging danger of partisan divisions between the two main political parties about whether or not to tolerate this situation. Too often, a bogus dilemma has been cited between the aims of encouraging voting by members of socially disadvantaged groups and guarding against fraud.

Too little has changed since the Committee on Standards in Public Life published its report into the Electoral Commission in January 2007.4 The main change between 2007 and 2014 is that the headline statistics show that the problems of inaccuracy in the electoral registers, already serious in 1981 and worse in 2007, have continued to amplify.

Good electoral administration is a regulatory matter requiring determined administrative action. Yet the bodies responsible for such administration – local government authorities, the Cabinet Office (currently responsible for electoral matters at central government level), and the Electoral Commission – have too often failed to act. It is too easy to blame sociological factors and voter disengagement for what are administrative shortcomings.”

Source: http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/publications/electoral%20omission.pdf