Postal voting has been steadily increasing in the UK, perhaps in line with our aging population. When I delivered Labour Party leaflets to postal voters during the 2019 General Election in my constituency of Barrow and Furness many of them were for sheltered housing and retirement homes. According to the Electoral Commission 8.4 million postal votes were issued for the 2017 General Election, or 18% of the electorate compared to 16.4% in 2015. Each postal vote comprises a ballot paper and a signed document to verify your identity. These documents are all checked prior to polling day and the ballot papers are placed in sealed ballot boxes.

Local party officials are present to witness this and, although the actual votes are not displayed, experienced campaigners can gauge how well they are doing based on prior knowledge of voting intentions. Validating thousands of postal votes is a mammoth undertaking for local authority returning officers and many employ software packages to ease the burden. IDOX is an established provider of such services. According to their website this enables:

Returning Officers to compare 100% of signatures and dates of birth on returned Postal Vote Statements with stored application forms, the Postal Vote Checking software has the ability to seamlessly interface with our EMS and a number of electoral systems from other providers, in order to deal with cross-boundary elections.

Fully portable, the software allows users to run their opening sessions at remote locations, even outside the council’s network infrastructure for ultimate flexibility. It also provides extensive automated reporting and management information on postal vote returns on demand.

Our Postal Vote Managed Service offering is delivered as an outsourced managed service, tailored to meet your needs. This provides a ‘pop-up shop’ with all hardware along with a dedicated Project Manager and Technical Support on site for the duration of the election. This ensures you can run your postal vote opening sessions with complete security and confidence. If required, the solution can be moved to a count centre on polling day.

Companies like IDOX do not count votes. They do not verify votes. They provide technical support for returning officers and their staff to do this.

Nevertheless, Twitter has been awash with claims that the postal vote was rigged to favour the Conservatives.

It began with the publication of Lord Ashcroft’s post-election poll. 38% of his sample were postal voters. This matches up with his 2017 poll when 36% of his sample were postal voters. As noted above, there has been an upward trend in postal voting in recent years so no surprises there. The surprise for some people was that the Ashcroft poll sample was so heavily weighted to postal voters. In 2017 postal votes were issued to 18% of the electorate. Ashcroft poll sample contained twice that percentage. How come?

There is a clue perhaps in his polling method:

“I surveyed over 13,000 people on election day who had already cast their vote, to help understand how this extraordinary result came about. The results show who voted for whom, and why.”

If you are asking people who have already voted, while others are still to cast their votes, it makes sense that postal voters will be overrepresented.

Unfortunately, a lot of people on social media have assumed that the number of postal voters in Lord Ashcroft’s sample is representative of the electorate as a whole. They compare this artificially high figure with the actual number of postal voters in 2017, as recorded on the Electoral Commission website, and suspect electoral fraud. Their suspicions are compounded by the ill-advised comments of BBC political editor, Laura Kuennsberg and Dominic Raab, suggesting that the postal votes were favouring the Conservatives ahead of the count. Kuennsberg and Raab were relying on estimates shared by local party officials who witnessed the verification process described above. Whether Kuennsberg and Raab should have shared them on national television is another matter. But the idea that the Conservatives had privileged access to the outcome of the postal vote ahead of polling day is not true.

All well and good, except that Peter Lilley, a right-wing Tory MP who now sits in the House of Lords was a director of IDOX. Never mind that he resigned as a director in 2018, this was proof positive to those who erroneously believed that IDOX and not the returning officer, was responsible for checking and counting postal votes. IDOX had to be complicit in the fraudulent use of postal votes to rig the election for the Conservative Party.

In summary, the three component parts of the conspiracy were:

1. that the number of postal votes was double that in 2017;
2. that the Conservatives had illegal access to the votes ahead of the count;
3. that a company run by a Conservative peer was in charge of the postal votes and must have

artificially boosted the number of postal votes in order to guarantee a Conservative victory.

NONE OF THIS IS TRUE. But once a conspiracy theory is launched it attracts fresh ‘evidence.’

I have seen questions raised about the high number of postal votes in Blackpool.

https://twitter.com/PaulWar17502822/status/1215064584731668482?s=20

The actual vote is slightly down on 2017. This is consistent with the decline in Labour votes in many northern constituencies. There was not a massive switch to the Conservatives. But there were large scale Labour abstentions. The high number of postal votes is not surprising. Again, the Electoral Commission reports that:

At a constituency level, postal voters ranged from 1.0% in Belfast West to 44.3% in Newcastle upon Tyne North.

Postal voters are also more likely to vote:

The proportion of postal voters returning their ballot papers always exceeds the turnout among ‘in person’ voters: this year[2017], 85.1% postal electors used their postal vote compared with 65.9% who turned up to vote in person. 

Postal votes accounted for 21.6% of all votes included at the count. This compares with 20.5% in 2015 and 18.8% in 2009.

The low turnout in Blackpool probably indicates a higher abstention rate amongst ‘in person’ voters than postal voters, which would inflate the percentage of postal votes in those constituencies.

Even more bizarre are the “My friend is a postal worker who saw masses of postal votes undelivered in sorting offices after the election” stories. Knowing the strength of union organization in the postal service I find it hard to believe that, if true, there has not been a massive response from the CWU. But think about it. On the one hand we are asked to believe that IDOX have grossly inflated the postal vote to benefit their Tory paymasters. Meanwhile all the presumably Labour postal votes have been hijacked and are still in sorting offices awaiting delivery. They cannot both be true and, to be honest, I don’t believe either of them.

I will end with my own constituency, a Labour marginal seat in the north that voted Brexit. If the Tories were abusing the postal vote system to break down the ‘Red Wall’ we would be prime candidates. And we did go Conservative. But our postal vote was only around 14%, up on last time but entirely consistent with an aging constituency voting in wintertime. There are many reasons why we lost the General Election. Fraud was not one of them.