Election scandal

BEYOND an analysis of the Conservatives’ majority at the 2015 general election (Letters), the result of the 2005 general election urgently needs to be looked at.

The Representation of the People Act (2000) effectively legalised postal voting on demand, allowing party activists to distribute as many postal voting forms as they wished, with none being scrutinised by a registration officer.

The 2005 election returned a Labour government with a majority over its nearest rival, the Conservatives, of 770,000 votes. A whopping 3,693,000 postal votes were cast, in terms of raw votes more than five times the size of Labour’s majority over the Tories.

Because of our constituency system, this doesn’t necessarily indicate wrongdoing, but the key point was Judge Richard Mawrey QC’s investigation into vote-rigging by the Labour Party in 2004, published two months before the 2005 election.

In his famous ‘ banana republic’ finding, Judge Mawrey commented that ‘to assert that “the systems already in place to deal with the allegations of electoral fraud are clearly working” indicates a state not simply of complacency but of denial.

‘The systems to deal with fraud are not working well. They are not working badly. The fact is that there are no systems to deal realistically with fraud and there never have been.’

The case in point was that of six Labour councillors in Birmingham and their supporters, whom a police raid the night before the election had found at a table that was covered with postal ballots.

GERRY DORRIAN, Cambridge.