Absentee Ballots On Demand: Lethal to the Democratic
Process
The use of absentee ballots on demand - that is without
conditions such as absence from home or disability - has
been introduced in over 20 countries and 29 US states since
1992 supposedly to address declining turnout. Their main
result however has been increasing fraud while turnout has
continued falling. This is unsurprising: in 1975 the French
National Assembly voted unanimously to ban unconditional
use of absentee ballots because such practices are too
prone to fraud. The Right generally suspect these practices
are now being used by the Left for antidemocratic purposes.
In June 2008 Alabama State Secretary Beth Chapman stated
'absentee ballots are the heart and soul of electoral
fraud.' In July 2008 the US Republican Party National
Committee website posted details of ongoing voter fraud
prosecutions: absentee ballot fraud was directly present in
most of the 27 states shown. Moreover, once account is
taken of the indirect role absentee ballots play in
electoral malpractice it can be seen they are involved in
most fraud cases. Vote buying requires their use so buyers
can see the ballots are ticked in the right places. The use
of absentee ballots on demand effectively removes the
safeguard against fraud, bribery and intimidation which
votes being witnessed as cast in secret at a polling
station creates. Before the right to a secret ballot was
properly protected by this practice employers and landlords
could intimidate or bribe employees and tenants into voting
under their scrutiny.
Republican suspicions of democrat electoral fraud continued
through the 2008 Presidential campaign. John McCain
suggested Barack Obama was personally implicated in
electoral fraud upon a massive scale. The democrat US
Senate 'supermajority' gained in 2009 followed six months
of court battles in Minnesota concerning suspect absentee
ballots ruled unacceptable by local election authorities
but later selectively reinstated through legal channels
which have acquired a notorious reputation for 'judicial
activism' in favour of democrat interests.
Electoral fraud in the UK is now also widespread: since the
authorisation of postal (i.e. absentee) ballots on demand
in 2001 there have been over 50 electoral fraud convictions
and dozens have been jailed or are awaiting sentence.
Jurors in these trials have been threatened, including by
use of arson. In the 2008 Slough case the presiding Judge,
Mr Richard Mawrey QC, stated postal voting on demand made
"wholesale electoral fraud both easy and profitable" and
accused politicians of failing to act after repeated
scandals. He concluded unlimited postal voting is "lethal
to the democratic process... There is no reason to suppose
this is an isolated incident. Roll-stuffing [packing the
electoral roll with fictitious voters] is childishly simple
to commit and very difficult to detect. To ignore the
probability that it is widespread... is a policy that even
an ostrich would despise." Similarly critical views have
been expressed by Scotland Yard. The use of postal votes
has increased over twenty fold since 2001. Fraud may now be
massive: in 2007 tens of thousands of postal votes were
'lost' in Scotland alone. Newspaper exit polls indicate
Labour gained five times more votes by post than the
Conservatives. Given such facts, the Tories - which, with
the Liberal Democrats, failed to oppose the introduction of
these practices - stated on their website: 'Questions must
be asked why Labour Ministers are sitting on their hands,
and whether they are failing to clamp down on postal fraud
for partisan reasons.'
In 2006 the Campaign to Defend the Right to a Secret Ballot
(CDRSB), formed in 2002 to oppose postal ballot fraud,
organised a conference on electoral standards at the UN in
New York. The conference report examines whether these
reforms were introduced not only to address falling voter
turnout, but also for factional reasons arising from
conflict between Left radicalism and conservatism. The
CDRSB proposes alternative means to increase political
participation which can also help manage this conflict in
the resolution at the end of this pamphlet. A UK survey
showed over two thirds of respondents agreed with this
resolution. At diplomatic levels the CDRSB has focussed on
relations between the chief conservative defender of the
free world - the American Republican movement - and the
primary state of radical change on a world historical
scale: Russia. There is now significant American Republican
willingness to develop this conflict resolution initiative
provided matters are dealt with upon a roundly honest
foundation. The Russian government responded positively in
2007 and there is an ongoing possibility of further
cooperation in the implementation of this project. The
CDRSB historical analysis and conflict resolution proposals
are as follows.