Postal voting is fraught with problems for USA

I do not blame Donald Trump for being reluctant to answer “yes” to the question: “Will there be an orderly transition after the election?” If he wins, there won’t need to be a transition, just an inauguration. But whoever wins, because this election is being conducted to a significant degree by post, there cannot be a quick inauguration.

I attended a webinar on postal voting in the USA, and in many states it is possible for people who have been sent an unsolicited ballot paper to vote without being registered to vote.

They would have to “pre-register” their voting intention and follow it up with ID later.

Because of this, it may not be possible, unlike in this country where everyone needs to be registered to vote in order to vote by post, for it to be known who is the winner until all the unregistered voters have confirmed their identity.

Therefore Donald Trump is right to have concerns about the integrity of the voting system in the USA.

However, there is no reason that if Covid is still an issue next May that elections next year cannot be held by post in the UK, as our voting system is far more secure.

Cllr Jonathan Bishop Community councillor for Nantgarw

Don’t censor text of problematic novelist

MICHAEL O’Neill’s interesting letter (Echo, September 26) raises a number of important questions.

Personally, I do not feel that it would be helpful to amend the text of Evelyn Waugh’s novels to remove offensive words and attitudes, as they provide a context for the world in which his characters live.

Faulkner frequently uses the word to which I think Mr O’ Neill is referring, but all of his characters have a real humanity regardless of race.

I believe Waugh is far more problematic than other outstanding English novelists like Hardy, Forster, Graham Greene and the sadly underrated LP Hartley, perhaps because he was both a snob and the closest to the Establishment of his time.

Ray Jenkin Cardiff

Extremists have been ushered in

DEMOCRATIC elections are not divisive by definition in the same way as a referendum because in an election voters elect an MP to represent all their constituents in Parliament regardless of how they voted.

In stark contrast, the narrow majority for the Brexit referendum result has been subverted by extremists to exclude not only those who did not vote for it (a majority of all voters due to those who abstained) but all those who voted Leave on the false promise of “the easiest deal in history”. Far from that, it now appears we will be lucky to get any deal at all, let alone one that delivers all the benefits of being in the customs union and the single market.

The party of small business is now the party of billionaires.

The Brexit referendum was primarily intended to heal divisions within the Conservative Party but has caused them to self-destruct by handing unconditional power to the unelected mastermind of the Vote Leave campaign, Dominic Cummings, for whom our hapless and hopeless Prime Minister is the fall guy in Parliament.

Margaret Phelps

Penarth

Virus worst-case scenario fears

STOP scaring us with the “worstcase scenario” called “reasonable” only by the Swansea authors of the Welsh Government Technical Advisory Group’s “New Reasonable Worst Case Scenario for the Winter” published on September 9 2020

The model is primitive and, critically, includes nothing on the effectiveness of the test-trace-isolate system in Wales.

England’s system is collapsing with many tests exceeding even the two-day limit and their tracing finding low fractions of contacts.

The virus is running beyond capacity in English lock-down areas, but we’re told this is untrue in Wales.

We’re bringing back analysis of NHS staff test-data from Serco’s failing “Nightingale” service.

It’s fully unreasonable to assume collapse of the “test-and-isolate” system, our prime tool for controlling the virus.

Drakeford needs to tell Gething to share the blame for current deficits in capacity and short-falling the 24-hour target.

And secondly to ensure we have an excellent system within weeks. Max Wallis

Penarth

There is no reason that elections cannot be held by post in the UK as our voting system is far more secure

Jonathan Bishop Nantgarw

Everyone can save lives by masking up

AT A time of national crisis, the outbreak of the Second World War, the British Government had 38 million highly technical respirators manufactured, to protect civilians and children from possible German poison gas bombs.

In January 2020, it was suggested that the Government should issue cloth face masks to civilian adults, to limit, to some degree, the quantity of corona viruses exhaled into the air we all breathe in.

The Government opposed that on the strange basis that choosing to do nothing would be more efficient than taking possible preventative action.

Science tells us that 41,000 citizens died from a coronavirus that could only have come from one unique, generic source, expelled from the lungs of infected persons who probably had no symptoms.

Mathematics explains the exponential R figure, that every coronavirus which we can catch in a globule, before it might be floating in air currents which others inhale, makes a huge numerical difference to the spread of the infection. A tiny reduction of viruses expelled at source, must restrict the wider spread from the many people infected from every single, separate source.

There is a huge divide amongst Britons, of a majority who see masks as personal protection from inhaling disease, strongly discouraged in January and legally enforced in August. Only a minority have the vision to perceive that each citizen has the opportunity to save lives and limit the pandemic, by using a mask to reduce the possibility, unknown, that viruses from them might infect others.

CN Westerman

Brynna