Despite the disappointing (but very positive!) result in Peterborough The Brexit Party has every reason to be cheerful. The whole might of Labour's electoral juggernaut was brought to bear and they only squeaked the win by fewer than 700 votes. The good news is that "The Brexit Party takes the lead for the first time in our latest YouGov/Times Westminster voting intention survey, on 26% of the vote." Now that the pollsters are actually listing TBP as one of the choices, that choice is being made. The Lib Dem blip last week is history...I hope.
TBP say in a communication to supporters: "Our party is just eight weeks old. We had only two weeks to campaign after our tremendous victory in the European elections. Yet we came within 683 votes of unseating the Labour Party and we beat the Tories into third."
"Peterborough was 201st on the Brexit Party’s list of potentially winnable Westminster seats. If we can come so close there, then no Labour or Tory seat is safe any longer."
Maybe I shouldn't mix two subjects but there is a lot of background noise that the 'block postal vote' won it for Labour; certainly wouldn't be the first time for Labour, nor in Peterborough! Last year they became part of a scheme ("Peterborough is one of eight areas in England to take part in a Voter Pilot scheme to help combat electoral fraud") [edit: ** see update below] "which aims to reduce the risk of election fraud and ensure voters have confidence in the electoral system." I wonder what they found. Apparently yesterday about 20% of the cast votes were actually postal votes...about 6000 votes. Last nights pictures of a certain ethnicity celebrating was food for thought: relevant old post about overwhelmingly one ethnicity (and ususally one community!) being involved? From that post:
“Postal voting on demand is inherently unsatisfactory. The whole system is open to abuse. Secret ballots were introduced in 1872 to stop exactly this sort of problem and we now seem to be going back to the 19th century.”This by Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, an academic expert on elections: worth a read Electoral Omission, and in full HERE in PDF, the "dramatic decline in the quality of the electoral registers between 2006 and 2014"; voting fraud is rife and The Electoral Commission is "still a flawed institution"...we know from recent shenanigans it still is, probably worse.
**[Update 20:30] Talking of probably worse, thanks to anon who posted THIS LINK: it appears that "A scheme to stop voter fraud in Peterborough has been stopped because of city MP Fiona Onasanya’s conviction and sentence."... ..".A spokesperson for Peterborough City Council said: "We have spoken to the Cabinet Office about our pilot and it has been agreed that, for this year, we will not do a pilot as other election/democratic processes may have to be undertaken due to the conviction of our MP.”"
WTF?!! This really stinks: an election shouldn't be an excuse to stop the postal vote [fraud] pilot; it is the PERFECT time to test the scheme!
2 comments:
The voting scheme you refer to focussed upon postal votes.
It involved hand delivery of the forms and subsequent checks verifying their proper useage.
Peterborough recently decided to withdraw from the scheme.
The local newspaper headline suggests it withdrew after the last MP was convicted - which must have been about the time they realised they were soon going to have another election.
https://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/news/politics/scheme-to-reduce-voter-fraud-dropped-following-peterborough-mp-fiona-onasanya-s-conviction-1-8817061
wow...thanks for that. I have updated the post. Plus the 'community'Labour contingent in the council could have 'helped' in this decision.
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