And I suppose honour, decency and integrity are just for the fucking hippies, eh?

As regards Rule 1 – do these ‘disagreeable things’ include lying to the electorate about who can and cannot win the election?

Were people wrong to not heed Rule 2 after the stolen election in Florida in 2000, or the dodginess surrounding votes in Ohio in 2004?

Rupert’s original post referred to an instance of outright lying by Lib Dems in Eastern region – that the Green Party could not win, i.e. was incapable of winning, in that region’s Euro election. Some Lib Dems have said that the result – the Greens didn’t win a seat – was proof that their electoral communication was not “lying”. It is one thing to say the Greens will find it hard to win a seat – that much was fair given the results in 2004. To say that they “can’t win” at all – without knowing beforehand how the votes would happen – is in fact a lie. To also put out leaflets on election day, coloured green, with the text “Greens withdraw from Euro election” surely does not fall under “disagreeable” yet acceptable things parties do to win as per your Rule 1?

Does delivering a dishonest leaflet count as a “disagreeable thing”. I actually find this post disagreeable, but that is probably because I believe that parties and candidates behave in a proper manner.

I agree completely. I am constantly thinking about how I would help out a party if I was a member, and I can’t come to any other conclusion that the only useful way would be to get out there, make a nuisance of myself, but most importantly to work out what the people I’m talking to have on their mind, politically, and find whatever argument I can from my list of policies to show them it is in their interests to vote for my party. Perhaps disagreeable is the wrong word.

So far the rest of the commentators here are just displaying those very sour grapes you’re talking of. It’s amazing that they still can’t work out that ignoring your rule 2 is pretty pointless. It’s even more amazing, it would seem, that they advocate a lack of party specific literature.

After all if we’re going to remove all spin, all “opinion stated as fact”, and try somehow to force each party to adhere to a colour scheme to ensure those “dumb electorate” don’t get duped by such crude ploys…why don’t we just scrap party campaigning all together and have a drab independant body that carefully sits down with everyone in the land and (in balanced manner) explains the positive facts to them and nothing else?

“And I suppose honour, decency and integrity are just for the fucking hippies, eh?”

Incorrect. The decency monopoly is held by those who supported the invasion of Iraq.

Oh, & one more think Paskini – Mousavi.

Enough said?

And I suppose honour, decency and integrity are just for the fucking hippies, eh?

Guys – elections are dirty and mis-represent opponents. That’s politics for you.

But in the instance of fraud does it seem wiser to take the attitude of the United States ’00 or Iran ’09?

Come on people – we’re supposed to just accept outright lying and stealing in politics? Why all the fuss about expenses then? “Politicians are dirty and in it for themselves. That’s politics for you.”

Uh, I think not.

Rule 2 is obviously subject to the poll being free from fraud or deliberate voter disenfanchisement such that the fairness of the result is serouly in doubt

As Don points out in point 2, you have to learn from your mistakes rather than carrying the grudge on your back. If party X claims that you can’t win, your job is to demonstrate that the claim is untrue. And if your argument is so complicated that the referee (ie the electorate) can’t follow the argument, you are not allowed to claim foul.

Lots of unpleasant things are permitted in elections. You can claim that your opponent is ineffective or unelectable, and you can give the electorate enough information to conclude that your opponent is stupid or potentially corrupt. If you accuse an opponent of paedophilia without rock solid evidence, you have committed a foul.

It is hard to commit a foul.

Sunny wrote: “Guys – elections are dirty and mis-represent opponents. That’s politics for you.”

Being ‘economic with the truth’ about what a rival candidate *means* is misrepresentation.
Printing blatant lies is quite another.

I hold my MP (and, by extension, the entire LibDem party) to higher standards than that.
And so should you.

So much for the moral high ground…

“If you want to win an election, you have to be prepared to work harder and do more disagreeable things than your opposition.”

Don, where do you stand on farming postal votes? (By this I mean, encouraging people on the electoral register to apply for a postal vote, or applying on their behalf – with or without their knowledge – and then harvesting the blank ballot papers before they have been filled in.) Is that one of your down & dirty disagreeable things you just have to do, and no point in whingeing if you don’t do it and lose?

Just asking, because there’s a hell a lot of it about. In fact, it’s pretty much Labour’s no.1 tactic in parts of the country.

@13: Don, where do you stand on farming postal votes?

This practise is, at best, just short of electoral fraud. Postal voting shouldn’t be encouraged.

Guys – elections are dirty and mis-represent opponents. That’s politics for you.

What’s your point, Sunny? That people shouldn’t complain about it when it happens?

A lot of commentators seem not to be taking this post in the spirit it was clearly intended.

Disagreeable in this context doesn’t mean dirty tactics, it means things that are annoying for a party activist but necessary, like delivering leaflets even though the football’s on, or spending more time on the doorstep with people who you personally disagree with but who might agree with some of your party’s platform if you give them a couple of minutes, and less time with people who agree with you on everything and are certain to vote for your party.

“where do you stand on farming postal votes? (By this I mean, encouraging people on the electoral register to apply for a postal vote, or applying on their behalf – with or without their knowledge – and then harvesting the blank ballot papers before they have been filled in”

As for this, nothing wrong with encouraging people on the electoral register to apply for a postal vote, everything wrong with applying for a postal vote on someone’s behalf without their knowledge. The first is about enfranchisement, the second about disenfranchisement. The smears that the Labour Party does this should be supported with evidence. I have only heard of this happening once in my region, it was by a Tory and he was prosecuted for it. I don’t believe there’s a lot of it about either – that tends to be peddled by people who don’t like people voting by post because they have elitist ideas about not making it easy to vote so only the people who think like them will vote.

Arre you seriously saying that if you canvass an elderly supporter who was immobile, you wouldn’t ask them if they’ve considered voting by post and give them an application form for them to fill in and send back? I fail to see what’s wrong with that.

There is a big difference between a moral victory and a real victory – whether someone else plays clean or not it is pure sour grapes if you complain that you were incapable of putting the ball in the back of the net yourself.

When the whistle is blown the rules are the same for all sides – if you are incapable of mitigating against anything which is thrown at you then you will not win.

Greens simply cannot be trusted with power because they object to the prospect that they would ever cross their own lines in the sand – just to put this into context if this was WW2 again the Greens would have allowed Hitler to walk all over us and the holocaust would still be continuing to this day.

Sunny@7: ‘Guys – elections are dirty and mis-represent opponents. That’s politics for you.’

Surely you would agree that there are some limits to how ‘dirty’ a party may get? If so, then the issue arises as to where that line of limit is. Rupert’s post was probing that question. So what’s the problem with the sort of criticism Rupert engaged in?

Paskini clearly isn’t talking about dirty tricks. “Disagreeable things” in elections means trudging round estates in the rain, listening to motormouths telling you all their pet hates, smiling and bearing it, all that. Not lies and misrepresentation.

“The smears that the Labour Party does this should be supported with evidence. I have only heard of this happening once in my region, it was by a Tory and he was prosecuted for it.”

This was the incident I had in mind, where the perpetrators were prosecuted: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/apr/05/politics.localgovernment (“Judge slates ‘banana republic’ postal voting system”) http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-ukelection/article_2408.jsp.

It is obviously a common practice all over the country, but nobody in Labour wants to do much about it. A probable example in Jack Straw’s Blackburn here: http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2005/05/straw_aide_link.html (“Straw aide linked to ‘voters’ in empty flat”) and more testimony here: http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/electoral_fraud.html.

Craig Murray points out the scandal that the postal ballot papers are mixed in with the ballot box papers before counting, the effect of this is to hide whether postal voting fraud has taken place (and as it serves no other purpose is presumably the reason for doing this).

I can tell you for a fact the practice certainly isn’t widespread across the country. Not in any of the areas I’ve lived in, certainly, which range from Labour safe-seat to Labour ultra-marginal.

To be honest, I can’t see how you could possibly cheat in a way that can’t very easily be identified. It’d be much easier to commit offences of personation than it would be postal voter fraud. I suspect those, like the Tory in my area, are one-offs.

Regarding mixing postal votes in, that is probably an attempt to stop parties effectively sampling votes where the numbers of votes are very small, so that no individual’s vote can be identified. Returning officers tend to be (rightly) very big on secrecy of ballot.

You can tell me for a fact that you personally never saw anything dodgy going on. But if you’re a clean-living chap, you wouldn’t be told anyway.

Overall, the whole thing is perfect for plausible deniability: “I never asked for this to happen, nor knew it was happening”. That’s not a comment on you personally.

We need much more careful safeguards on postal voting, and one obvious one would be to count the postal ballot separately and for the returning officer keep the ballot papers separate until the result is fully endorsed and declared. Then, some dodgy-looking figures are detected before the declaration, the returning officer can look into it. It might also be an idea to prevent the senior officers of one party rotten boroughs from being the returning officer and to have an independent returning officer brought in from out of the area.

For full details about postal voting and counting procedure:
http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/47126/Part-D-FINAL_27879-20510__E__W__.pdf

Craig Murray’s assertions are incorrect. Candidates and agents are allowed to attend the opening of postal votes. They can see how votes are cast, possibly with enough information to identify voters if they are quick witted or have photographic recall, and are thus required to sign secrecy declarations.

Postal votes are eventually mixed in with in-person or proxy ballot papers collected from polling stations. This only happens after the verification of the number of votes at a polling station has been accepted by everyone.

All paper documentation associated with the election is stored for several years afterwards. The documentation includes information about which ballot paper (by serial number) was issued to each voter and every ballot paper. This information is retained to support criminal prosecutions of electoral fraud (and you can Google for loads of recent examples) or civil cases of malpractice. It is widely acknowledged that MI5 see the ballot papers of those who vote for “extremist” parties.

The weaknesses of the postal voting system are many: votes sent to the dead or people who have moved home, false applications, “family” applications, coercion etc. The counting process is actually pretty robust in comparison with those failings, and party workers are enabled to spot the obvious frauds (eg dead voters).

Addition to above: the only time that party workers have an opportunity to meaningfully sample votes is during the verification process (when the number of ballot papers for a polling district is checked for correspondence with papers issued). Ballot papers are unfolded on a table in front of party observers, thus parties can obtain an indication of voter activity by polling district. And these samples are genuinely anonymous. During the count itself, ballot papers from different polling districts are mixed.

Party sampling during verification is why candidates are frowning or smiling when they are interviewed in the counting hall: it may be the first time they’ve seen reliable evidence of their popularity.

Seems like postal voting might need a post in its own right, I don’t think it exactly counts given the revision of the OP’s laws.

Ooh, lots of questions:

“And I suppose honour, decency and integrity are just for the fucking hippies, eh?”

Honour, decency and integrity are all essential. The rules are to help beat the dishonourable, indecent and dishonest.

“do these ‘disagreeable things’ include lying to the electorate about who can and cannot win the election?/”Does delivering a dishonest leaflet count as a “disagreeable thing””

No.

“Come on people – we’re supposed to just accept outright lying and stealing in politics?”

The point is that the way to stop lying and stealing in elections is not through complaining, but by taking positive action and winning support through ethical campaigning.

“Don, where do you stand on farming postal votes? (By this I mean, encouraging people on the electoral register to apply for a postal vote, or applying on their behalf – with or without their knowledge – and then harvesting the blank ballot papers before they have been filled in.) Is that one of your down & dirty disagreeable things you just have to do, and no point in whingeing if you don’t do it and lose?”

That is a crime and should be reported to the police.

“So what’s the problem with the sort of criticism Rupert engaged in?”

It doesn’t achieve anything. Complaining about Lib Dem bar charts and all of their other misinformation strategies won’t stop them doing it (what might be effective is if this were part of a wider strategy to undermine their image as the ‘nice’ party who aren’t like the other politicians, but I don’t think that’s quite what Rupert was doing).

Other things – Iran is obviously different, but the example of America is a good one – the Democrats lost in 2000 and 2004 due to their own faults, not due to cheating (there was cheating, but it was the Democrats’ errors which meant 2000 was close enough for the Florida to matter, and the less said about their campaign in 2004, the better. The Republicans did just as much cheating in 2008, but it was irrelevant).

People who didn’t like the implications of this post might be interested in seeing another relaed piece I wrote a little while ago – http://don-paskini.blogspot.com/2009/04/making-labour-nasty-party.html

Basically, I disagree with Sunny about how politics is a dirty business and we just need to accept this (to simplify and possibly misrepresent his argument). I think the kinds of vicious negative campaigning which parties often resort to is immensely harmful, and that even if they work in the short term, the harm done by using them in turning people off politics outweights the benefits. But basically, the message for anyone who thinks similarly is don’t complain, campaign.

#24

You’re right to raise the distinction between verification and counting, but on the technical procedure I’d point out that a) sampling during the verification is impossible for most local authorities as they’ll insist to staffers that ballot papers are placed face down while they’re being counted, and b) during the count itself different local authorities will have different procedures, but European elections are the only elections where ballots from different areas/postal votes have to be mixed during the count, so in some areas meaningful sample per polling district will be possible (especially likely during local elections)