Hackney Election Fraud Report Causes A Stir

Blair and Kelly mobbed by Shoreditch locals just days after the Hackney election result was declared

Safely re-elected with a huge increase in his Mayoral majority and with his ruling Labour Group having lost only one seat in the council elections (when other London boroughs showed large swings to the opposition), Hackney Labour leader Jules Pipe was feeling pretty smug in the heady, post-May 4th days. Smug enough to hang a self-congratulatory banner bearing his full-colour portrait Ceausescu-like from the top of Hackney town hall and to welcome Tony Blair to Shoreditch for a private back-slapping session. What they did not realise, while quaffing their champagne, was that the opposition in Hackney had not accepted their inevitable punishment at the polls lying down. In the wake of the 2002 all-postal elections, when rumours of massive electoral fraud swept the borough, some "concerned individuals" had got their act together and hired a consultant to examine Hackney’s electoral register in detail and to carry out an analysis of the council ward and mayoral elections, looking for evidence of fraud.

A draft version of the analyst’s report circulated amongst opposition politicians within a few days of the elections and the full report – 20 pages with 200 pages of detailed appendices – was issued last week. I’ve long been a political cynic of the first order, but when a copy of the report fell into my lap the other day and I saw what had been discovered, even I was shocked. The author (who according to rumours was a Lithuanian academic), stated that he was unable to report definite evidence of fraud in the elections, but then went on to detail:

• 152 cases of duplicate polling cards with identical names and addresses;
• 636 cases of duplicate polling cards with identical names and the same address written differently or separate flats in the same house or block with a common front door;
• 4,157 register entries with at least two identical but uncommon names (such as Dashraht Mason-Malik, Richard G Tarasofsky and Frumet Wertzberger) registered at more than one address, with 550 of them at three or more addresses;
• Three “extended families” with a total of 62 members apparently registered to vote 176 times on a “round-robin” basis at 82 different properties;
• A 3.7% increase in the Hackney electorate since 2005, after several years of gradual decline (the implication being that this is due to the increase in duplicate register data rather than genuine population rise);
• A 35% increase in turnout since 2002 for the mayoral election, compared with a 3% rise in electorate and an 11% increase in turnout for the council election;
• A first preference mayoral vote for Jules Pipe 51% higher than in 2002, with Jules getting 526 more votes than the largest number of votes gained by a Labour candidate in each of the 19 wards all added together – all the more surprising considering that 1,659 fewer people voted in the mayoral election than in the council election;
• Strange results for Tory leader Andrew Boff, who lost his Queensbridge ward seat with a 22% swing to Labour but managed a 66% increase in his mayoral vote despite what the report describes as “…personal factors that caused a decline in support” (believed to be a reference to the fact that Hasidic voters in northern Conservative strongholds withdrew support for him after his well-publicised Civil Partnership);
• A strangely low “average votes per voter” figure for the Hackney council election of just 2.67 of the maximum 3 votes, compared with 2.89 in Islington, 2.83 in Southwark and 2.82 in Wandsworth;
• Vote share patterns for the council and mayoral elections showing large differences, whereas corresponding data in nearby Newham showed similar vote share patterns for the two elections;
• A strangely low mayoral vote for well-known Independent candidate Hettie Peters who ran an active “battle bus” campaign with supporters drawn from all political parties, but managed only 2/3 of the vote achieved in 2002 by the Trotskyist candidate, the late Paul Foot;
• The case of sisters Katharine and Alison Dixon who once again appeared twice on the electoral register at two different addresses, despite an investigation by Guardian journalist Hélène Mulholland in 2005 after they received two postal voting forms each, resulting in a Council statement that such an error was “a very rare occurrence”.

The history of elections in Hackney is riddled with reports of voting fraud, some of which eventually proved to be true, as with the Conservative and LibDem Councillors who were jailed in 2001 for vote rigging in the 1998 council elections.

In the old days, the trick was supposedly based on fraudulent proxy votes, using names obtained from local cemetery gravestones or by convincing geriatric or non-English speaking voters to surrender their papers.

In 2002, the trick allegedly was to use insider information to follow the postal vote deliveries round in areas with large numbers of ethnic minority voters and to offer to “help” the recipients with the complex issue of witness signatures and sealing of envelopes within envelopes.

This time around, with extensive media focus on postal voting fraud allegations country-wide, it did not surprise me that the Hackney report states: “Some aspects of the Hackney elections data clearly palliate the concerns raised. For instance, I was not able to detect any signs of fraud associated with postal voting.”

Either the elections were fraud-free and simply generated a set of extra-ordinary metrics, or someone very smart decided in advance to keep the postal voting clean and perform the vote rigging by other means. Who knows which of these is true? What is indisputable, however, is that one way or another some very, very strange things happened in Hackney in the elections of May 4th 2006.

Hackney Cynic

With apologies - correction to earlier posting shown in mauve.