Take note of Sarah's posting above. Those secure procedures have been practiced for nearly a century and are well proven. The only innovation is the use of barcodes to introduce an added check that the ballot paper and the declaration were sent to the same person, which may catch some attemmpts at fraud, which would not have been caught in the past.

Note also the early mention in the thrad that it has always been possible to establish how an individual has voted in the past by matching the number written down in the register next to your name with the number on the back of the ballot paper. The protection was (and is) that the registers are sealed together and the papers are also sealed together in a separate package. These can then only be opened as a result of a court order.

For decades one has heard allegations of some occurrences of every illegal practice referred to this week. The number of occurrences were very few, impossible to confirm and I can recall no instance in my experience where there was any suspicion that they could have altered a result. There have been some serious allegations this week of fraud on a scale never previously alleged. I for one will be delighted if the police are able to bring some prosecutions. However, those allegations are very isolated in an atmosphere where the press and parties were desperate to find and make capital out of fraud allegations.

On the whole the all postal ballot has increased the turnout by about a tenth of the electorate or about a third of the actual voters. That is good but too little increase to be very good. It has on the other hand given the Government a lot of bad publicity, which is not good for them and it is doubtful that the extent of the increase in the poll is sufficient for even the government to regard it as a valuable or successful experiment.

Richard