Crackdown on electoral fraud

THE other day I met an undergraduate who is studying in Newcastle and whose home address is outside this area.

He mentioned that he had cast two votes in the general election: one in Newcastle and one at his home.

He was genuinely astonished when I told him that he had committed a serious criminal offence by casting more than one vote.

To make matters worse, he said that before voting he had checked with the council who had advised him that it was a quirk of the electoral system that students could have two votes.

I hope that it was he that had misunderstood the advice and that what the council officer had meant was that legitimately he could be on more than one electoral register (but must vote in one place only).

It is reasonable to assume that nationally this was not the sole example of double voting.

In fact on Twitter and on some student forums, people have bragged about voting twice.

With so many individual constituency results being decided by just a handful of votes, this is a worrying situation.

It links in with widespread concerns over electoral fraud, in particular with postal voting.

How can the authorities prevent double voting occurring in future parliamentary elections? Some high-profile prosecutions might help.

However it could be difficult to trace offenders.

There are approaching 50m voters including thousands with the same names.

Furthermore there are hundreds of separate electoral registers and they are all held locally, not on a single national database.

Although the numbers are large, surely it would not be a great challenge to produce a computer programme covering the whole UK and based on NI numbers, which could search the marked registers for double voting.

Trust in our democracy is fragile. The prevention of voter fraud (whether intended or innocent) should be worth investing in. ALAN BIRKMYRE

Newcastle