Was the Postal Vote for GE2019 Rigged? Here’s the data.
A story about conspiracy theories, freedom of information, elections, and British democracy.
medium.com/@alexstacey/was-the-postal-vote-for-ge2019-rigged-heres-the-data-aedeb93129ebtl;dr version
I heard about anomalies and apparent prior knowledge of postal vote results. The Electoral Commission were not able to answer my questions. So I sent 300 Freedom of Information requests to local councils and have been compiling basic postal vote data here.
There is huge variation in how different constituencies run the vote; I’ve had written admission of rule breaking. The system is wide open to abuse and we shouldn’t accept the lax and haphazard way our elections are observed. It’s also unclear what role private companies play in assisting elections.
Background
Just before the election in December 2019 the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg and Conservative MP Dominic Raab both made comments on camera about prior knowledge of the result of the postal vote (see here and here). It caused a wave of people talking about how they could have known; the Electoral Commission’s rules state clearly that no tallying of postal votes is allowed to happen before the full count. Was there foul play?
/* dramatic music goes here */
More questions
Lord Ashcroft is apparently a bit of a stats geek and publishes all sorts of analytics about election data. An exit poll he conducted suggested that postal vote numbers had more than doubled from 17% of the vote in 2017 to 38% of the total vote in 2019.
I also read (and this goes firmly into tin-foil hat land now) that a private company called IDOX, with senior Tory MP Peter Lilley on their board, are responsible for assisting the counting of ballots and the running of elections for lots of constituencies. Read what they do here. Some claim that they may have done shady things in the election through a subsidiary company Halarose, which they then dissolved in December straight after the vote. I wrote to IDOX asking for more info on their role in the election. They didn’t reply.
So… what was going on here? I didn’t know what to make of all this. Was there foul play? It is in the territory of conspiracy theory. It literally is a conspiracy theory. But although it’s a shitty thing to think about, and not something to talk about at the dinner table at Christmas time (sorry family!), I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that nefarious people may have considered their options for winning the election by any means necessary — including cheating.
As I had a bit of time on my hands before going back to work, I decided to try to find out a bit more.
/* open desk drawer to reveal deer-stalker hat and pipe */
Investigation Station
I sent a Freedom of Information request (my first ever) to the Electoral Commission asking about postal vote numbers in different constituencies. They replied fairly quickly that they don’t have that data. This baffled me. The organisation that oversees the fairness of elections don’t have the postal vote count data available. If there was massive abuse of the postal vote, they would have no idea at this stage that it happened. Looking at their site, they haven’t updated their main stats page since 2018. They have said they’re going to publish a report later in the year and that they’re still gathering data.
So, I started sending out FOI requests to local councils. I sent about 300 of them asking these 4 questions:
How many people were registered to vote by post in your constituency?
How many postal votes were received?
How many postal votes were marked as invalid?
What was the result of the postal vote by party?
Data Entry Time
Most councils have provided answers in a helpful way within the 20 days they have to respond to FOI requests so I’ve managed to get the numbers for about half of the 650 constituencies in the UK. Some councils (around 10%) refused to provide the info, stating that the Electoral Officer is not bound by FOI. I got replies like this from those councils:
Thank you for your request for information, however we will not be treating this as a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act as the Electoral Registration Officer’s role falls outside of the legislation. The registration of electors is governed by the Representation of the People Act 1983 as amended. Under Section 8 of the Act, the council must appoint an officer of the council to be the registration officer for any constituency or part of a constituency coterminous with or situated in the council’s area. Any appointment as Electoral Registration Officer is separate to any other appointment and, although appointed by the council, the Electoral Registration Officer’s responsibilities and duties are personal. An example of this is that the register of electors is deemed to be the property of the Electoral Registration Officer, not the local authority. The Electoral Registration Officer does not carry out the duties on behalf of the local authority but in his own personal capacity.
I don’t really understand what this law is about, or why the Electoral Registration Officer works in a personal capacity and doesn’t have to answer FOIs. I would think the running of elections is exactly the sort of thing that should be covered by FOI but what do I know. On the plus side, I learned the word “coterminous”.
About 13% (39 in total) failed to reply to the FOI in the given time.
On the question of invalid postal votes, some were not able to answer because they mix the postal votes with the non-postal votes before counting, and only at that stage do they remove the invalid ones. But some seem to go through the postal votes to remove invalid ones before they are mixed with the others. Everyone seems to do it a bit differently.
On the question of the result of the postal vote by party, no council was able to answer. Because the rules state that postal votes should be mixed with non-postal votes before counting them — something I didn’t realise when sending the FOIs.
But then I received this reply:
Wyre Forest Freedom of Information,
Worcestershire Regulatory Services
10 January 2020
Afternoon
Please see below response to your recent FOI.
A: 12,733
B: 11,152
C: 325
D:
Davis — Green Party — 492
Garnier — Conservative Party — 7342
Lunn — Labour Party — 1710
Miah — Liberal Democrat — 1224
Rejected — 51
…so at least some of them count the postal votes before mixing them. This is clearly against the rules published by the Electoral Commission.
So, was the postal vote rigged? And does any of this matter?
Sorry to disappoint but I don’t know the answer. It’s clear that Lord Ashcroft’s figure of 38% postal vote is not representative. Some are high — as high as 55% of the total vote — and some are as low as 10%. Other than that I haven’t done much analysis. It would be interesting to look at how postal vote numbers have changed over the last 3 or 4 elections. It would also be interesting to compare marginality of the constituency over time vs. turnout percentage and stuff like that. There’s quite a lot that could be analysed and if anyone reading this fancies doing that, then please take the data and do so. You can find all past election data on the Electoral Commission’s site.
I won’t be doing it myself. I’m done here. My gut feeling is that it’s not going to show anything particularly useful or if it does, it’s certainly not going to be conclusive, because we don’t know the counts in the postal vote. So, in a constituency that had 55% of the total vote by post, if somehow every single vote was for one party, we would never actually know that. Nor would the Electoral Commission. At this point, I’m wondering if the Electoral Commission actually have any sort of clue about what’s going on. I suspect their roll is less about overseeing elections, and more about reassuring the public that they are overseeing elections.
I’ve also since had it explained to me how Laura Kuenssberg and Dominic Raab knew about the postal vote result. Apparently, in most constituencies, observers attend the postal vote opening event and they try to see the results of the ballots and tally them, then they report the info back to HQ. This practice is forbidden in the official rules. The ballots are supposed to be face down and no tallying is allowed, but apparently is standard wide-spread practice. And nobody seems to care.
Conclusions
In the grand scheme of things I think there are much bigger problems with British democracy than potential rigging of postal votes. Gerrymandering — ie. redrawing constituency borders to favour a party — and the fact that most people live in “safe seat” constituencies where they are told their vote doesn’t matter is a far bigger issue. There are only a few places in the country where votes actually matter. And for many, voting for the party they’d actually like to win is a wasted vote. Media manipulation, fake news and that sort of thing are also massively problematic. As are unelected peers and members of the church in the House of Lords. But those things are accepted and legal despite them being profoundly undemocratic.
But the fact that the oversight of the actual voting process is so lax, and that someone like me with no political background can spend a few hours sending out emails and find clear evidence of rule-breaking — and rule-breaking that the Electoral Commission is unlikely to even find or report, is worrying and points to a need for better observation and more transparent management of our elections if we’re going to continue to tell ourselves that we live in a democracy.
Note: Don’t follow me if you want more political writings, because I’m done with it. I’ll continue to write notes about things that are on my mind and random bits and bobs, but politics can jog on.