On democracy and electoral fraud
"Those who cast the
votes decide nothing.
Those who count the votes decide everything." - Stalin
Those who count the votes decide everything." - Stalin
With the UK election officially underway some recent problems with the democratic process make for interesting reading. Before we in the West get too smug and critical about elections elsewhere consider these reports. And just how secret are our ballot boxes and voting papers?
SIX middle-aged Muslim men, all pillars of their communities, won seats on Britain’s biggest local authority in the most corrupt election campaign since the Victorian era.
Vote-riggers exploited weaknesses in the postal voting system to steal thousands of ballot papers and mark them for Labour, helping the party to take first place in elections to Birmingham City Council.
They believed that their cheating would be hidden for ever in the secrecy of the strong boxes where counted votes are stored, never suspecting that a judge would take the rare step of smashing the seals and tracing the ballots back to the voters. Election corruption has been so rare in the past 100 years that lawyers have struggled to find examples since the late 19th century, when Britain was adjusting to the novelty of universal male suffrage.
The elections last June were the dirtiest since the general election of 1895, when Sir Tankerville Chamberlayne, the Conservative candidate for Southampton, notoriously travelled by cart from pub to pub, waving and throwing sovereigns at the crowds. His election was later ruled invalid.
The Birmingham vote- riggers were more cunning than the flamboyant Sir Tankerville. They coldly exploited communities where many cannot speak English or write their names. They forced what the judge called “dishonest or frightened” postmen into handing over sacks of postal ballots. They seem to have infiltrated the mail service: several voters gave evidence that their ballot papers were altered to support Labour after they put them in the post.
Proof that votes were stolen came when Richard Mawrey, QC, the election commissioner, ordered ballot boxes to be unsealed. Unknown to most voters, ballot papers can be traced back to individuals through serial numbers. The judge was struck by how many had been amended, sometimes using correction fluid.
Voters were traced and asked if they really had voted Labour. It emerged that some had handed completed postal ballots to Labour supporters calling at their homes offering to post them. The envelopes had been opened and the papers altered, then delivered to the election office for counting.
One of the wards where corruption was rife covered Aston, an inner-city neighbourhood. This is the fiefdom of Muhammad Afzal, a city councillor for 23 years, regarded as the most powerful man in Birmingham Asian politics. At midnight two days before the election, the police stumbled on what appeared to be a vote-forging factory. Half a dozen men were discovered in a warehouse with 274 unsealed postal votes for Aston ward.
Among them were Mr Afzal and his two fellow candidates. Mohammed Kazi is a longstanding Labour officer. He is a former postman and official of the postal workers’ union but says that this is irrelevant because he left the job in 1993. Mohammed Islam is the trustee of a mosque. A handwriting expert found that Mr Islam had signed 121 voting papers using five names and six addresses.
Along Birmingham’s ring road lies a grid of terraces forming the largely Kashmiri community of Small Heath, heart of Bordesley Green ward. The most senior Labour candidate here was Shah Jahan, a former banker and, for a brief period in 1979, a postman. Mr Jahan, who was seen several times collecting ballots from a postman, received more votes than the other Labour candidates. Some forged ballots were found to contain crosses next to his name alone.
“No doubt Mr Shah Jahan considered that, having gone to the trouble to get the votes from the postman, it was only fair that he should be allowed to use them for his own benefit,” the judge said.
Ayaz Khan, a law graduate, managed the post office in Small Heath. His witness statement, not shown to the court but seen by The Times, claims that Khalid Mahmood, Labour MP for Perry Barr, “asked me to stand as a candidate”. Mr Mahmood denies this, saying: “I have not had a direct role in promoting him or anything else before his selection.”
Shafaq Ahmed, another Labour Party officer, was the third candidate. He denies a claim that he kept postal vote applications in his video shop and asked customers to sign one. The police caught him with ten sets of unused postal ballots.
The vote riggers were versed in election cheating. The basic technique is so well known that two senior Labour figures, on separate occasions, both described the same method to The Times. The first step is to consult a little-known public document called the marked register. Produced locally after every election, this shows which individuals on the electoral roll have voted.
A vote rigger notes the names of people who never seem to vote. They may be dead, living elsewhere, illiterate or apathetic. These are the people whose votes are stolen. Labour knows that postal voting is vulnerable to suspicions of fraud. Mr Mahmood’s selection for the 2001 election tore apart his constituency party when an unprecedented surge in postal voting led to suspicions that Mr Mahmood’s supporters had rigged the selection ballot.
The Labour National Executive Committee investigated but found no wrongdoing. Mr Mahmood’s majority at the general election was halved by a swing to an anti-sleaze candidate protesting against the alleged vote-rigging. Mr Mahmood said that there was no substance to any of the allegations about his selection.
Bitterness over last June’s vote rigging festers. Six supporters of the grassroots People’s Justice Party, which organised the election petition against Labour, have been arrested on suspicion of forging witness statements, which they deny.
Shah Jahan, facing ruin, believes that lessons may be learnt from the scandal. “Although I am going to suffer,” he said, “this may be a good thing for the community. The community will learn to do in Rome what the Romans do.”
With Britain poised for parliamentary elections next month, a High Court judge has delivered a devastating ruling on the current arrangements for allowing people to vote by post.
He said: "The system is wide open to fraud and any would-be political fraudster knows that."
Judge Richard Mawrey quashed the results of two local council elections in Birmingham after deciding there had been systematic large-scale vote rigging. But the implications are wider: it was regarded as a test case for similar complaints in other cities; and record numbers of people have been applying for postal votes in the general election. He criticised the government's insistence that the current postal voting system was working.
"Anybody who has sat through the case I have just tried and listened to evidence of electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic would find this statement surprising," he said.
The scandal in Birmingham threatens to undermine Britain's long-established reputation for trustworthy elections. For several weeks, a special election court heard lurid allegations of postal votes being stolen and forged. Six councillors from Tony Blair's Labour Party denied wrongdoing.
According to petitions from supporters of rival parties, three of the councillors - Muhammad Afzal, Mohammed Islam and Mohammed Kazi - were found by the police in the middle of the night in a warehouse with hundreds of postal votes spread out on a table.
One of their lawyers admitted that might have looked suspicious. But he argued it would be wrong to conclude they were guilty of corruption and forgery.
Democratic traditions
Other allegations spoke of an attempt to bribe a postman to hand over a bag of ballot papers, and of threats to cut his throat.
Labour Party supporters were said to have intimidated voters into voting their way and stood over them while they filled in their ballots.
Some arrived at polling stations to vote in the traditional way and were astonished to be told that a postal vote had already been cast in their name.
Stricter controls might eliminate forgery, but the mere existence of a postal ballot makes it easier to bully someone to vote a particular way
Many people in Britain will have been astonished to hear tales about an English election which they associate with dodgy regimes abroad.
Britain is more used to sending observers to watch out for abuses in other people's elections.
The current problems date from 2001, when the law was changed to make postal voting available to anyone on demand - no reason required.
The government made the change in order to increase turnout at elections, but critics said it was calculated to benefit the Labour Party most.
Since then, there has been an explosive growth in postal voting, especially in inner city areas.
'Anything is legal'
In Birmingham, the number of postal votes more than quadrupled between 2001 and 2004. In one of the areas where the election result was challenged, nearly half the registered electors had ostensibly applied to vote by post.
Evidence presented in court indicated it was possible to intercept or forge both the application forms and the postal ballots themselves. Many ballots had signatures that differed from those on the application.
The forgers were alleged to have applied for postal votes under names taken from the publicly available electoral roll, asking for the ballot papers to be sent to an alternative address or safe house.
The gaps in the law were raised within a few days of the June elections. The Birmingham Labour leader, Sir Albert Bore, wrote to Mr Blair saying: "At present, in relation to the handling of postal ballot papers, the law is so general that almost anything is legal."
There is a striking example of that. The ballot papers seized by the police from the warehouse were handed over to election officials, who decided they had no reason to reject them and included them in the count.
The judge commented to the Returning Officer that her function was nil.
"If something seems wrong with the postal ballot papers," he said, "you have no powers or resources to ferret around to see if the votes are legitimate."
Intimidation fears
Calls for a tightening up of the law have come from the Electoral Commission, an advisory body. But failing any such move so far, the commission has negotiated with the political parties a voluntary code of conduct on postal voting. It reveals several surprising facts.
• First, it is perfectly legal
for the parties to produce and distribute their own version of the form
applying for a postal vote. People do not have to use the official one.
•Second, the completed form
doesn't have to be sent straight to the electoral registration officer,
but can instead go via an intermediary address.
The commission says it wanted a requirement for applications to be returned directly, but the political parties wouldn't agree.
•And third, the code concedes
that party workers may be present when someone completes the actual
ballot paper and may take it for delivery - though they should not see
what is written and should ensure the vote is sealed.
This last point touches on perhaps the most serious potential defect of postal voting: its vulnerability to intimidation. Stricter controls might eliminate forgery, but the mere existence of a postal ballot makes it easier to bully someone to vote a particular way. He or she may be forced to reveal a ballot paper in a way that is simply not possible at a polling station.
Some observers argue that the hierarchical and paternalistic nature of some ethnic minority communities makes them especially open to such abuse. But other experts say the fraud is not confined to particular communities, or to Birmingham, or to the Labour Party.
Zimbabwe’s opposition will on Monday lodge a formal complaint about irregularities in vote tallying in last week’s parliamentary election, which it claims was fraudlent.
The Movement for Democratic Change will today ask the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to respond to its claim of widespread discrepancies between votes tallied at polling stations and the final results reported.
The party, which lost by a landslide to President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party in the March 31 vote, says it is studying questionable results in as many as 76 of Zimbabwe’s 120 electoral districts.
“The problem is now more extensive than we thought,” Welshman Ncube, the MDC’s secretary-general, told the FT. He said his party would take legal action if it received no response.
Final results announced at the weekend gave Zanu-PF 78 seats in parliament, and Mr Mugabe has the right to appoint another 30 MPs. The party now has a two-thirds majority, giving it the power to amend Zimbabwe’s constitution without opposition support.
The MDC won 41 seats, and one seat went to an independent candidate. The result represents a serious tactical setback for the MDC, which had sought to mobilise neighbouring countries, led by South Africa, to press Mr Mugabe to hold a fair vote.
However, at the weekend two African delegations endorsed the vote. Observer teams from the South African government and the Southern African Development Community separately concluded that the vote “reflected the will of the Zimbabwean people.”
The findings jarred with the conclusions of several northern-hemisphere countries, which criticised electoral conditions as heavily skewed in Mr Mugabe’s favour.
Zimbabwe did not allow missions from the US, the European, or the Commonwealth to observe the vote, several countries fielded small teams of diplomats.
The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a grouping of 35 human-rights organisations, on Sunday echoed the MDC’s misgivings about alleged discrepancies in results in some constituencies. According to the ZESN, in the Gormonzi constituency, for example, won by Zanu-PF, the number of votes announced by ZEC rose by 62 per cent between the close of polling and the announcement of results.
On Saturday Mr Mugabe congratulated Zimbabweans “for having voted correctly”. He said his party “remains ready to interact with the MDC,” but warned it against making good on its vow to mobilise its supporters to protest alleged voter fraud.
“We can also raise mass action against their mass action, and there would naturally be conflict – serious conflict,” he said.
“The Iraqi people ... have lost much of their trust in the parliament, and some are regretting their participation in the [January 30] elections”, Abd al Karem al Mohammedawi, a Shiite tribal leader, told the March 30 London Financial Times after the previous day's session of Iraq's 275-member Transitional National Assembly ended in chaos.
The assembly meeting, held on March 29 in Baghdad's Green Zone — the huge compound that houses the US embassy and which is guarded by US soldiers, tanks and helicopters — was supposed to name a parliamentary speaker, and then a president and two vice-presidents, as a step toward selecting a replacement for US-appointed interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
‘‘Instead”, reported the Financial Times, “the nation witnessed a display of ethnic in-fighting, backstabbing and farce before the plug was pulled on television transmission and Arabic music filled the airwaves.”
Associated Press reported: “Negotiators spent much of the morning trying to convince interim President Ghazi al Yawer, a Sunni Arab, to take the speaker's post. But he refused, and is holding out for one of two vice presidential spots...
“Tensions rose as Tuesday's meeting was delayed, with politicians milling about or huddling in the halls of Baghdad's convention center. Finally called to order, it quickly disintegrated, with lawmakers lashing out at negotiators and arguing whether to delay the decision on a speaker.
“Officials, eyeing the confusion as well as television cameras broadcasting the melee, abruptly kicked out all media and closed the meeting to the public...”
Minutes later, Allawi left the session, followed by Yawer, and the assembly dispersed.
The March 30 London Telegraph reported that there is a widespread disgust at the assembly among ordinary Iraqis. It quoted the remarks of Awada Dakil, a Shiite shopkeeper who voted for the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), which holds 51% of the seats in the assembly, as typical: “Nothing has changed. The only difference is that we were once ruled by a dictator and now we are ruled by clowns.”
Associated Press reported on March 30 that the “assembly still needs to name a president and two deputies, who will in turn nominate a prime minister. The presidency is expected to go to Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani and the premiership to Shiite politician Ibrahim al Jaafari.”
Jaafari, currently one of the US-appointed interim regime's two vice-presidents, is Sistani's brother-in-law and head of the Islamic fundamentalist Dawa party.
Under the interim constitution imposed by the US occupation regime in November 2003 and accepted by all of the parties participating in the January 30 elections, selection of a presidency council — consisting of a president and two vice-presidents — requires a two-thirds majority vote by the assembly. Selection of a prime minister requires either the unanimous nomination of the presidency council and a simple majority vote by the assembly or a two-thirds vote of the assembly. If such votes cannot be obtained, the US-appointed government headed by Yawer and Allawi will remain in office.
While Sunni Arabs make up at least 20% of Iraq's population, only 17 of the assembly's 275 members are Sunni Arabs. Following the call by the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), an organisation of 3000 Sunni clerics, most Sunni Arabs boycotted the assembly elections in protest against the US-led occupation.
The March 28 New York Times reported that for several weeks UIA politicians and “foreign” diplomats “have been streaming like anxious pilgrims to western Baghdad, to the vast blue and gold dome of the Mother of All Battles mosque”, to meet with Sheik Harith al Dari, the 64-year-old public spokesperson of the AMS. Their aim has been to persuade the AMS to endorse the transitional assembly and any government officials it selects.
The NYT reported that in a rare interview “Dari made [it] clear that he would continue to view the armed resistance as legitimate until the American military offered a clear timetable for its withdrawal — a condition very unlikely to be met”.
“We ask all wise men in the American nation to advise the administration to leave this country”, Dari told the NYT. “It would save much blood and suffering for the Iraqi and American people.”
The demand for a clear timetable for the withdrawal of US occupation troops from Iraq, which was a major plank of the UIA's election campaign but which its leaders have since dropped, has also been made by the followers of rebel cleric Moqtada al Sadr, the most popular Shiite figure after Sistani.
On March 26, Agence France Presse reported that Sadr spokesperson Sheikh Nasser al Saedi, speaking to Shiite worshippers at the Grand Mosque in Kufa, south of Baghdad, called for “a million-strong demonstration to demand a timetable for the end of the occupation”.