Applause but still appalled

JUST one-and-a-half cheers for the Electoral Commission for its report on the all-postal vote elections on June 10.

At last someone is waking up to some of the problems that, here in East Lancashire as in many other parts, marred voting in several recent years.

But no more than one-and-a-half cheers!

They still fail to understand or accept the amount of fraud that can take place. They still quote as "evidence" only those very few cases where there is a prosecution.

Yet we all know the chance of getting people to go to court and explain how someone in their family or community filled in their votes illegally - or stood over them to make sure they voted the "right way" - is as close to zero as you can get without going negative.

And we know from local experience that even when people are willing to put their heads over the parapet, the police don't always give voting fraud a high priority.

But at least the Electoral Commission, New Labour's multi-million pound national election quango, has told the Government not to hold any more all-postal pilot schemes.

They even said that any referendum on a regional assembly here in the North West must not be all-postal.

What this means is that the chance of having a referendum in this Parliament is even less than before - unless they are crazy enough to hold it on the same day as a general election!

The all-postal referendum in the North East will, however, go ahead in a couple of months and if even that region votes no, the whole thing will be dead for some time.

So why only one-and-a-half cheers and not three?

It's because the new report is only a reprieve. What these supposedly independent armchair theorists are really trumpeting, in line with their political masters, is the current buzz-word "choice."

Watch out for another report in the spring with a "foundation model" and "multi-channel voting" (more New Labour jargon), including not only polling stations and insecure postal votes - but also people texting and e-mailing their votes!

In other words, let's think up even more ways in which votes can be fiddled and electors bullied to vote against their wishes.

And just how much will it all cost?