10 Armed Forces Personnel
117. In a conventional election, service personnel
who cannot, or choose not, to attend a polling station can apply
for a postal or proxy vote. Under all-postal voting, service personnel
can vote by post, or appoint a postal-proxy. As we were told by
Martin Fuller, Director of conditions of service of military personnel
at the Ministry of Defence, since 2000 it has been the responsibility
of the individual to arrange their vote:
"[…] with the introduction of the wider
range of registration options under the Representation of the
People Act, we then discontinued the Service register and relied
on the individual to register and to exercise their rights. We
advise them on how they can register and we try and facilitate
the registration process by making forms accessible, but we do
not take it beyond that." [197]
"We tend to regard voting as a private-life
matter, but we do not survey it as part of our regular attitude
surveys or questionnaires, so it is left entirely to the individual.
From anecdotal evidence, we suspect that registration on voting
levels are probably lower than you would wish, which is partly
a reflection of the mobility of Service personnel and the fact
that we have a large community of quite young people for whom
voting perhaps is not a top priority, although we do brief all
recruits on voting arrangements and it goes out in unit standing
orders and then it is periodically updated. We remind people once
a year to re-register, but beyond that we do not check how many
of them have registered or voted." [198]
118. As described above, the Services and Ministry
of Defence leave it up to the individual to choose and organise
their method of voting. However Colonel Don Kent of the British
Forces Post Office, told us that if an individual wished to vote
by post, it may not always be possible for ballot papers to be
dispatched and returned within the polling timeframe, especially
for personnel stationed on ships or submarines:
"[…] it is not always going to be possible.
I am not sure exactly what the timeframe is. Three weeks has been
mentioned as maybe the timeframe. Typically, for most servicemen
serving all around the world, we despatch mail five days a week."[199]
Colonel Kent added:
"I should perhaps follow through the journey
of the letter to make it easier for everybody to understand the
timeframes involved. It is despatched by the local authority,
then it is one to two days for Royal Mail to get it into the BFPO
system. We do not hang on to it for more than a day, maybe two
days, depending on our five-day-a-week despatching process, so
we are talking about another two days to get it to most servicemen
around the world. Then you have the internal arrangements for
that serviceman to handle that ballot paper however he sees fit
and in whatever timeframe he personally gives to that. Then we
have the return journey which is pretty much the same, two days,
say, back to the UK and then two days back through the Royal Mail
Group, so we are talking about ten to 14 days, I would suggest,
as the absolute minimum. Then there will be, as we were suggesting
there, some places around the world where we cannot meet that
quite reasonable timeframe. The Falklands Islands would be an
example where we only despatch mail twice a week. Currently in
Afghanistan we do not use scheduled flights five days a week,
but we use the RAF and that is only twice a week, and there are
a few other places around the world where we could not operate
to twice a week, and ships of course are another story altogether.
[…]. There is no standard schedule for how ships might decide
to be operating at any one time around the world, but typically,
and this month, for instance, there are 31 ships, I believe, at
sea and six months ago there were more, about 47, and there might
only be 17, 18 or 19, so there is not a pattern, which is the
first point. When they are at sea, depending on where they are,
the calling in at ports is variable. HMS Ironduke last
spring and summer was moving around the Caribbean and called into
ports at least twice a month. We have advance information on what
ports it is calling into, so we know within a five-day window
that is going to that port and we despatch mail. Every time it
calls into a port, it definitely collects its mail and it almost
always returns some mail. Mail comes back from, say, Miami and
it takes a couple of days, though from Jamaica it took three weeks,
so depending on the local country's mail system, it is varied
and would not easily reach the parameters of the election process."[200]
119. Martin Fuller from the Ministry of Defence conceded
that given the difficulties of getting postal votes to personnel,
it would be more practical for the Services to encourage personnel
to opt for proxy votes:
"One of the changes we may introduce when we
issue our guidance, which we are due to do shortly, is to encourage
people to use the proxy system rather more, and this is partly
because of the preparation for this Committee and looking into
the system and talking to the defence postal services, that I
think we should encourage people to use proxies more. At the moment
we leave it pretty neutrally as to whether they rely on postal
votes or proxy votes, but clearly for those who are likely to
be away from home on deployment or posted overseas at short notice,
the proxy system would probably serve them better."[201]
Again it will be up to the individual to arrange
this:
"We provide details of all the electoral registration
officers and their addresses so that they can approach them, but
I do not think we provide them. The forms tend to be different,
I think, from one area to another to some extent, so we do not
provide forms, but we aim to provide them with contact names and
addresses." [202]
120. Although Martin Fuller did promise that the
Ministry of Defence would look into whether personnel could apply
for proxy votes by e-mail:
"That may be practicable at least for some people.
Some people have easier access to e-mail than others, but it certainly
is a possibility that we can look into." [203]
121. The Ministry of Defence suspect electoral
participation rates among service personnel are low; considering
that the Government is trying to increase electoral participation,
we are surprised that there appears to be little attempt made
to encourage service personnel to vote. Every effort must be made
to ensure all who wish to vote are able. We are pleased that the
Ministry of Defence, when it issues its guidance, intends to encourage
greater use of proxies and we hope to see a copy of this guidance
in the response to this report. The Ministry of Defence and Armed
Services must offer more help to personnel who wish to apply for
a proxy vote; we recommend all new personnel are given forms and
guidance during their initial training period. We also recommend
that the Government, Ministry of Defence and Electoral Commission
consider the results of the electronic voting trial for military
personnel in the United States of America.
197 Q235, HC 400-III [Martin Fuller, Director of conditions
of service of military personnel, Ministry of Defence] Back
198
Q234, HC 400-III [Martin Fuller, Director of conditions of service
of military personnel, Ministry of Defence] Back
199
Q230, HC 400-III [Colonel Don Kent DCE, British Forces Post Office,
Ministry of Defence] Back
200
Q231-2, HC 400-III [Colonel Don Kent DCE, British Forces Post
Office, Ministry of Defence] Back
201
Q238, HC 400-III [Martin Fuller, Director of conditions of service
of military personnel, Ministry of Defence] Back
202
Q237, HC 400-III [Martin Fuller, Director of conditions of service
of military personnel, Ministry of Defence] Back
203
Q238, HC 400-III [Martin Fuller, Director of conditions of service
of military personnel, Ministry of Defence] Back
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