| Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
Lord Filkin: My Lords, the noble Baroness's hearing was as acute as ever. I referred to the electorate entitled to vote. Therefore, the proportion of those who voted would obviously be higher.
Baroness Hanham: My Lords, I believe that that is slightly more significant. If there is a 30 per cent turnout and one or two in 30 voters use the delivery point, that amounts to many more people than I believe was being suggested or than the figure which was sliding under the radar as the Minister was talking.
Lord Filkin: My Lords, the noble Baroness is right that it makes a difference but it is not a massive difference. We are talking about 2 per cent of the electorate who use the SDPs and about 4 per cent of those casting votes. Therefore, it makes a difference but we are still talking about very small proportions.
Baroness Hanham: My Lords, I shall not trade mathematics with the Minister across the Table. However, I calculate that, with a turnout of 30 per cent, about 6 per cent of voters would use the SDPs. I believe that shows that there is probably sufficient demand to ensure more than one SDP in any given local government area.
I also believe that one should be careful about where the supported delivery points are placed. In some areas, people will have to travel a long way to use them. They need to be as local as they can be to a substantial part of the electorate—I say "electorate" and not necessarily those voting.
I shall not push this matter further but I believe that the point must be understood. We must stop using the word "electorate" in terms of these percentages and revert to talking about the percentage of those who vote because that presents an entirely different picture. For the time being, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
The Deputy Speaker: My Lords, in calling Amendment No. 11, I must inform your Lordships that, if it is agreed to, I cannot call Amendments Nos. 12 and 13.
Lord Norton of Louth moved Amendment No. 11:
- Page 2, line 15, leave out subsections (4) to (6).
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this amendment stems from the discussion in Committee on clause stand part. On that occasion I raised the issue of whether or not providing polling progress information to political parties, as required under subsection (4), was compatible with the European convention.
The Minister will be aware that the Electoral Commission sought counsel's opinion on the provision to the parties of a marked register. The advice was that disclosing information in the way intended altered the balance between the party and the elector to the extent that it might constitute an invasion of privacy. The provision may thus amount to a disproportionate infringement of Article 8 and/or Article 3 of Protocol I of the convention.
I appreciate that the Government have taken advice. The noble Lord, Lord Filkin, included some details in his letter to my noble friend Lady Hanham on 6 February. That advice is that postal voting is compatible with the convention. I have no difficulty with that. The issue here is not postal voting but the provision to political parties of a marked register. The issue is specific and independent of the method of voting. Indeed, the opinion provided to the Electoral Commission raises a question about the post-election accessibility of a marked register under the existing arrangements.
The nub of the problem can be put very briefly. Under the traditional method of voting—voting in person at a polling booth—a voter can refuse to disclose his or her identity to party tellers standing outside the polling booth. Under the provisions of this clause, the voters have no right to withhold their identity. The information is disclosed by virtue of subsection (4). Electors could, of course, opt to cast a ballot in person at an SDP on polling day, but that does not solve the problem: it will already have been disclosed to the parties that they have not voted.
At Second Reading, the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, suggested that voting is a public act. I appreciate that point. However, as I pointed out in Committee, if postal voting is a public act, then so, too, is voting in person at a polling booth. The rights exercised by voters must be the same in both situations.
There is therefore a problem. I fully appreciate why this provision was introduced. I recognise the convenience to political parties of acquiring such information in fulfilling their vital role in the electoral process. We should be doing what we can to assist political parties as essential actors in the political process. However, doing so in this way may fall foul of the provisions of the convention.
The solution, as the advice given to the Electoral Commission indicates, is either to prohibit access to the marked register before the close of poll or to introduce safeguards. In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, wondered why the register was marked in advance of polling day. I think it would be helpful to know why this practice has been introduced. Prohibiting access would be one solution; not recording who has voted prior to polling day would, of course, ensure that such access was impossible. In terms of safeguards, one option is to provide for an opt-out for those who do not wish to be solicited by political parties.
I tend to go for the clean option, as I did when we discussed the sale of the electoral register to commercial concerns. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam
of Brighton, may have many recollections of our debates on that topic. I favoured banning its sale. Instead, we ended up with the somewhat messy option of an opt-out. If we are to go down the route of providing polling progress information, I fear we shall end up with another opt-out provision.However, providing for such an opt-out will be difficult in relation to the June elections. It is too late for electors to indicate an opt-out preference on the electoral registration form. I suppose that it might just be possible to have an opt-out provision for those elections by giving electors the right to inform the electoral registration officer that their names are to be annotated in the register to show that whether or not they have voted is not to be disclosed to the parties, although the annotation would be. That might just meet the point but it would require amendments to the Bill.
In short, the provision for providing polling progress information is potentially flawed. I believe that the safest course of action, which would not undermine the purpose of the Bill, would be to remove this particular provision. As I say, I appreciate why it was introduced but I think that, having been put in, the wisest course may be to take it out. I beg to move.
Lord Rennard: My Lords, a number of our debates have dwelt on the issue of turnout and have brought up the controversy about whether or not to have more postal voting in order to improve turnout. Here, we are dealing with a measure which may or may not assist political parties in encouraging turnout in the elections. There is something of an irony in that. If we are trying to encourage participation in the democratic process, on balance I feel that the parties must have that information if they are to encourage people to participate and send back their votes.
I note the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, in relation to privacy. However, it seems to me that many people are unaware that the list of those who have voted in a normal public election at a polling station is made available to the parties afterwards. That may not be commonly known, but if that list is available to the parties some time after the election, I do not see why there should be a problem in making available to the parties, before postal voting takes place in a pilot, the list of the people who have voted thus far so that they can chase up those who have not voted.
Compared with information on polling day, the noble Lord, Lord Norton, refers to how people may not choose to give to a party teller at the polling station their voting number or their address. But short of wearing a disguise, many people are actually recognised at the polling station when they go to vote. If they walk into a polling station in the normal election it is known whether they have voted and therefore someone has noted that they have not been so far in the day and they may get a call from the party at a later stage on polling day asking them to vote.
A number of safeguards may be necessary. I am concerned about how we might protect privacy. It seems very important that the parties provided with this information treat it with the same degree of confidentiality as they do the electoral register. Three or four years ago we added safeguards to the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act to prevent commercial organisations acquiring the electoral register. A coach and horses would be driven through those provisions if anybody was able to get hold of a list of who has voted by post so far, who has not, and make use of those lists. Safeguards must be built in. It is generally assumed that the parties will not pass this information on: that is a safeguard that voters probably generally need to have.
Lord Greaves: My Lords, I should like to add a point to what my noble friend has just said. The marked register in a normal polling station election is not available to political parties. It is available to anybody who wants to avail themselves of that facility. They may be representing political parties on 99 per cent of occasions, but anybody can inspect the marked register and obtain copies of it; not all candidates belong to political parties.
There is a crucial issue of principle here as to whether the act of voting is and should be a private act. I argue that it is not a private act; it should not be a private act, and if it ever became a private act that would be another blow to the integrity of the ballot.
Before the Ballot Act 1872, you had to turn up in person to vote and declare how you were voting. Either you declared it on the hustings or it was written in a register, which was then published. The ballot was not secret. But the second part of the integrity of the ballot, in addition to secrecy, is that the person voting is the person to whom the vote is allocated, who appears on the electoral register and who is entitled to cast that vote. Unless a list is available, at least after the election, of who actually voted, it is impossible to check whether fraud or personation took place, whether somebody tried to rig the election, or whether an individual tried to cast a vote, for whatever reason, which he was not entitled to cast.
All the talk of the Human Rights Act and so on interfering with the process is potentially disastrous. It is absolutely essential once the election has taken place that we can find out who purported to vote. If you cannot do that there is no way you can start making complaints and no way that you can really investigate close elections that might have been rigged in some way.
The issue here is that on a normal polling day, at a polling station, a political party is perfectly entitled to appoint polling agents who are entitled to keep their own marked register while they sit inside the polling station. So the political party itself, or rather the representative of a candidate at the election, is entitled at the close of poll at 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. to walk out with a marked register. What they are not entitled to do—and what is an election offence—is to tell people who has and has not voted during the hours of poll. That is why I am concerned that what is proposed for postal
elections and what has happened in some of the postal elections so far is different from the practice in a polling station.I am not saying which is right or wrong, although we have to think what we will all be doing during those two weeks after the postal votes are posted out and received by people. When I say "what we are all doing", perhaps I am not speaking for everybody in your Lordships' House, but I am certainly speaking for myself and I am sure for some of my noble friends. We will be chasing up those electors whom we believe were voting for us, and whom we believe have not returned their ballot papers. That is what we will spend a fortnight doing. It may be a foolish way to spend a fortnight but the Government want the polling day to be a fortnight and not a day, so what we do normally during the hours of polling on polling day we will do over two weeks—if we get all-postal elections in our areas. It is in that context that this issue has to be looked at.
On balance the Government are probably right to want to issue a list of who has voted at a particular stage, simply because if they do not a lot of people will be bothered by frantic politicians, not just for two or three hours in the evening of polling day, but for a fortnight, which is not good. There is a real problem here. The Government in the longer term—if all-postal ballots become more frequent and the marked register during the campaign becomes an accepted fact—must look at polling day legislation and see whether the rules on polling day ought to be changed and whether there is any good reason why who has voted during the day on polling day should continue to remain secret.
Next Section
Back to Table of Contents
Lords Hansard Home Page