Bring it on in general. The system is definetely open to abuse where people could register to vote at as many addresses as they like and whats to stop them from being caught unless someone blew the whistle on them?

If they had to show ID from a Government body it would be a lot harder, especially if they had to show a recent bill too but even then, I suppose a real determined person could make out they have moved and keep hold of the old ID and or say they lost the old ID if they really wanted to get some extra votes. I doubt many would go to that length but under the current system, I think its very easy to register to vote many times over. Bring in ID checks for sure!

They also need to look at how they can improve the postal vote system. Maybe they need to switch it to telphone voting with secure pin voting if thats possible but where would the paper trace be?

So how many people have been elected due to voter fraud that shouldn't have been in the last 100 years?

It is an expensive sledge hammer, and there isn't even a nut (present company excluded).

Well you seem to be saying that no one has or very few have but it wouldn't take that many people to vote numerous times to change elections. There have been marginal seats with majorities of around 40 or less! In the 2005 General Election there was 100 seats which had majorities of less than 1 thousand. If 100 people did what a BNP supporter told me that he did in the 2001 election and vote 10 different times for them, then those seats and the last few elections could easily have been very different!

In my council area, the Tories have often won council wards with majorities less than 50 and as low as 3 so don't think that because people haven't been caught enough and that there hasn't been enough information come to light on this, that it hasn't changed election and who governs outcomes, I think it would have done many times over! The key is to bring in ID checks nationwide and councils to do more checks on how many people might be registered at more than one address. Maybe credit reference agencies could be used to help suss on this too as they are good at helping find people who go on the run from paying their debts and try and become "ghosts" etc

So at the end of the day it appears people have no issue with being ID'd to buy alcohol, in a bank etc to withdraw money or take out a loan, to use various facilities they may be members of but many have an instant dislike to being asked to show ID when they vote for the people who run the councils/country.

It's like a lot of things that initially seem perfectly reasonable but then, when you look into it, just don't feel right. In the UK we've been fairly lucky in that our electoral system has been pretty non-partisan. We have an independent Electoral Commission that overlooks everything and we don't have the sort of obvious gerrymandering you see in the States. But this, combined with a lot of other stuff the Tories are trying to do (trade union reform, changes to the constituency boundaries, cutting back on the money other parties get in Westminster etc), begins to look a little suspicious.

In the US, voter ID laws have been pretty shamelessly used by Republican officials to suppress Democratic voter turnout. I'd hate to see similar stuff happen here. This looks to me like a solution in search of a problem.

Wait until you see the bill for your I.D. card. It is a ridiculously expensive solution to a nonexistent problem. The government can't afford it, so voters will end up paying.

The issue is far more serious at local election level. That has been seriously corrupted.

You're just avoiding the question. How many people have won elections as a result of fraud in the last 100 years? I didn't specify "only at general elections" did I?

I have no photo ID( no passport or driving licence) and I have never been asked to provide any in any other situation, I refuse to pay to get either when I dont need them so if this scheme goes nationwide I will not be able to vote.

The vast majority of convictions for electoral fraud in the UK have involved postal voting, proxy voting, adding bogus electors to the electoral roll, registering to vote at empty addresses. I would have thought efforts to stop electoral fraud would have been better targeted at tackling the types of fraud known to have been used. Not stopping people voting as someone else by pretending to be them at a polling station, which seems to be very rare.

It's almost as if the government doesn't want to deal with election fraud but has to show that it's doing something.

Quite right too, their sources of money are so totally not the same thing

And the gullable lap it up!

Which begs the question why they don't want to do anything significant, it's almost as if the government NEEDS electoral fraud.

They aren't the same thing, as taxation should be proportional to wealth, while a fee to buy an ID will not be.

Funny how we always seem to have a Tory PM when measures are introduced that lead to poorer people being less likely to vote.

Fact of the day, a lot of people don't know that the word 'gullable' is not in the dictionary

Government money is taxpayers' money, there is an extremely strong correlation* between taxpayers and voters, so it is not unreasonable to remark that the source of government money is the voters, even if that might only be 'most' rather than all, and 'one' rather than 'only'.



* noting that correlation is of course not causation, it should be borne in mind that many taxpayers are caused by voters (and vice-versa), albeit with an 18-year delay.

I suppose you become a taxpayer the moment you go into a shop and hand over pocket money to buy a vatable item

Technically yes, but the main point that people are deliberately avoiding is that there is no such thing as 'government money' because it all comes from the taxpayer, which is directly or indirectly all of us who ever spent any money on anything that somewhere in between the hire or loan or purchase or in fact any transfer of money where there might have been some form of government levy or taxation or duty and depending on printing costs we pay for the cash too.

There is no such thing as 'government money'. It all comes from us. Directly or indirectly. That's it.

As a democracy our government is of the people by the people so what is the problem.

WTF is it with people on here today? Are my posts being magically transformed to say 'u r all teh bottyheads'? I wasn't saying there was a problem, I was pointing out that government money - directly or indirectly - all comes from us.



If I said 'metal comes from rocks in the ground' would that be some major argument point because well no actually some is recycled actually and actually a bit actually comes from meteorites actually?

Do you expect us to be awed by your amazing insight? Do you think you are the first to notice that government collects money using taxes?

Sadly, your insight is flawed. Firstly the government spends more than it collects in taxes, that's why it is running a deficit. Secondly, the Bank of England can create extra money that wasn't raised in taxes. So that's two ways that the government's money isn't coming from us.

Even if you ignore both the above, you are also ignoring the point I made earlier that the level of tax paid should be linked to wealth or income or spending, while a fee for an ID card wouldn't. So you can correlate taxpayers and voters as much as you like, they aren't all making an equal contribution (in fact on average, most are taking out more than they put in, see my comment above regarding the deficit).

FFS it was just a remark, not a claim to some amazing deep sekrit nollidge!


Of course it is, it's just not coming from us *today* but it will be coming from us eventually.


Which you made *after* my initial remark. After, in response to, quoting it and then extrapolating in an entirely unnecessary direction, arguing about something that wasn't even mentioned until you brought it up for no other purpose than to argue about it!

Seriously, WTF is it about people on here today?

If you will insist on writing rubbish, then you should expect someone to point this out. And just because you use three letter abbreviations doesn't stop you having a potty mouth.

How is it rubbish? Money to pay for government stuff comes, directly or indirectly, from the general public, taxpayer, voter, whatever collective term of convenience is least offensive to the unnecessarily pedantic and/or argumentative types. Even the new virtual money created by the BoE will end up with us footing an additional bill of some kind when the consequences of that action take shape.