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Mr. Steen: Does my hon. Friend agree that the problem is not bogus candidates but genuine candidates masquerading under a bogus title? The problem is not that they should not stand--that is their democratic right--but how they describe themselves. I foresee a tremendously big court case every time one challenges such people as to whether they are describing themselves correctly.
Mrs. Gorman: My hon. Friend makes a strong point. In his case, someone described himself as a Conservative and considered himself to be local, so that was difficult.
Dr. Tony Wright (Cannock Chase): I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate, initiated so interestingly and eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich, East (Mr. Snape). I come simply to tell a story and then make a proposal.
The story is of someone who was challenged by a candidate describing himself as "New Labour" at the general election. It is arguable whether someone describing himself as a "Loyal Conservative" and standing against the hon. Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman) was seeking to mislead the electorate or to contribute to the democratic process, but in my case, to have a candidate standing as
"New Labour" against me is a deep affront. As in the case of the hon. Lady, I had no time to do anything about it. When the gentleman in question stood some four or five elections ago, he managed to secure 19 votes; having decided to describe himself as "New Labour", he managed to secure 1,615 votes and an outcome that produced 573 spoilt ballot papers.
The candidate enjoyed the fact that his name was Mr. Hurley. We realised afterwards that we had foolishly spent most of the election morning saying over the loud speaker, "Vote Labour. Vote early", which did not help our cause a great deal. Once we discovered what had happened, we took out newspaper advertisements to tell people that there was only one real article and that they should not be confused by substitutes. The candidate availed himself of free post at great public expense, much to the distress of postmen and postwomen who had to deliver bogus material to the electorate.
As ever, my name, suffering from the W factor, appeared at the bottom of the ballot paper, while he and other candidates were way up there. It turned out that we were taking people to vote who had voted for him and not for me. One old lady whom we had taken to vote memorably came out saying, "These 'New Labour' candidates are very good. I am glad that we are going to get them in." In a constituency that has been substantially reorganised as a result of boundary changes, I am known less well in some parts than in others, so that is an additional factor.
That entirely bogus candidate deliberately sought to mislead the electorate and put out material through the free post proclaiming his support for Tony Blair and new Labour and seeking to capitalise on the way the wind was blowing. I see the temptation of doing that. I could understand if Conservative candidates at the last election would also have liked to describe themselves as "New Labour".
When we came to the count, that gentleman, whom I had never met up to that point, told me absurdly that the returning officer had invited him to describe himself as "New Labour"--a ludicrous suggestion. When he made his little speech after the announcement of the result, he declared his undying support for me in particular and for the Labour party in general. On all the evidence, it was a deliberate attempt to mislead the electorate. As it happens, it did not matter, given that I was part of a landslide. However, the number of votes that he got was the size of my majority last time, so this is extremely serious.
Although the political system should not be monopolised by the existing players--we must have ease of entry for new people, whether they are quirky, eccentric independents or genuine new parties wanting to break in--we must get the balance right so that we do not allow deliberate misrepresentation to take place. My credentials on diversity are proved by the fact that, after the general election, our victory party and disco were held for us by the Monster Raving Loony Custard candidate, who is an expert on such matters.
This is not the time to rehearse the solutions to the problem. Some have been suggested, but there is not just one way to proceed. The matter must be approached seriously. We should regard the problem in the context of a range of other problems relating to the running of elections. We have paid some attention to the problem on and off over the years but have never seriously grasped
it. The Labour party had the Plant committee, which reported in 1993 and is known for what it said about electoral reforms. It is less well known for what it said about the conduct of elections, but it made a raft of reform proposals.
In the last Parliament, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker), who has gone to graze in pastures new, introduced the Parliamentary Elections Bill incorporating some 30 recommendations arising from the Plant committee deliberations. It also picked up suggestions from the Hansard Society report some years earlier. I shall not go through the range of proposals, but they included voter registration, emergency voting, ensuring that disabled people have access to voting stations, the day on which votes take place, counting procedures, expenses, and a range of issues to do with the conduct of elections, which are currently deficient and need to be corrected.
As a party and as a Government, we are about to embark on a process of sustained political reform. Many of us celebrate that. As part of that process, one of the proposals that has emerged over the years and gained much force recently is for an electoral commission. I invite the Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. O'Brien) to comment on that when he replies.
Mr. John Maxton (Glasgow, Cathcart):
This is the first time that I have spoken since you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, have been in the Chair. I take the opportunity of welcoming a fellow Glasgow Member of Parliament to the Speaker's Chair--the first since Sir Myer Galpern was there. It is a great honour for the city that you have been appointed to the position.
I do not intend following the route of my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) and other hon. Members by discussing the lesser candidates in elections. It is an important issue and has been well aired, but other aspects of the conduct of elections need to be raised.
If I had any objection to other candidates, it was to those who called themselves pro-life candidates--not because I object to candidates putting forward pro-life views, but because the title "pro-life" implies that every other candidate is anti-life, which is a very unfair description.
I shall speak about the way in which elections are conducted, including the registration of electors. I do not know the position elsewhere, but in Glasgow at the last election there were grave concerns about the allocation of schools as polling stations, and other polling stations. Major changes were made.
In my constituency, residents of two high-rise blocks of flats--largely old-age pensioners--who in previous elections had voted at the local primary school 100 yards
from their homes, suddenly found themselves transferred to a polling station a mile and a half away. That caused us considerable difficulties, but it caused them even greater difficulty. The greatest problem was caused to those voting for other parties, which had not laid on any means of getting them to the polls.
I am concerned also about the way in which the count was conducted in Glasgow. Again, I do not know the position elsewhere. In Glasgow, it was extremely slow and took far too long. All the counts for all the Glasgow seats had to be completed before any of the results were announced, which meant that it was 3.30 am before we could leave the hall where counting took place.
My main purpose in speaking, however, is to look to the future. Although I welcome the proposal for an electoral commission, one or two things must be done before such a commission is appointed. We are now in the electronic age, but we are not yet making full use of computers in the way in which we organise elections.
First, although the register is held in electronic form, the political parties generally get it in printed form. In some areas, one can get the electoral register on disc, but there is no statutory obligation for it to be provided in electronic form, or in an electronic form that can be easily read by the computers that most people have--the standard Windows 95 or other such formats.
Now that the register is in electronic form, it should be a rolling register. There is no reason why it should not be as up to date as possible when the election takes place. Anyone who can prove that he is living at a particular address should be included on the register at any point up to the calling of the election, if not right up to election day.
We must start cross-referencing the electoral register. We know when people are born, so we know when they reach the age of 18. If they do not appear on the electoral register then, there should be some check to find out what has happened to them in the meantime. We know that they go through the school system. Those records are increasingly held on computer by the same local authority that maintains the electoral register. I appreciate the potential dangers in terms of civil liberties, and we would have to be wary, but the task is not impossible.
My second and most important point is that, at the next general election, we should be voting electronically. People should go to the polling booth, receive a ballot paper, mark a cross on it by the candidate's name and, instead of putting the paper into the ballot box, should put it into a machine similar to that used for the national lottery. The vote will be recorded automatically and at 10 pm when the polling stations close, we will know at the press of a button the result of the election. The papers can still be placed in a ballot box after the vote has been recorded, so that a check can be carried out.
Electronic voting would save time, effort and in many cases the heartache of standing around in cold, dreary halls while people flip through papers and, especially when the result is close, repeat the count again and again. It is no longer necessary to do things in that way.
Initially, electronic voting will be conducted in much the same way as voting at present. People will go to the polling station, have their names checked off by a clerk and mark their ballot paper. I hope that all the polling stations in a constituency can be linked electronically and that the clerks can operate using a computer screen, so
that any voter in that constituency can vote at any polling station in the constituency, not necessarily at one to which he has been allocated, and his name will be recorded as having voted. There is a possible problem of fraud, but there is no reason why it should be any greater than at present, and fraud is not a major problem in Britain, as far as we know.
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