Family Voting in the Yookay?
How many (green) votes were coerced?
The Gorton and Denton by-election has happened, and as I predicted, Labour came third.
Though more people voted Labour than I expected (25% actual vs 10-15% prediction) and sadly not enough people were convinced to vote Reform so the Greens won. But, while turnout was lower than one might have hoped, there’s a real humdinger of an allegation that makes the Green victory very iffy.
Today we have seen concerningly high levels of family voting in Gorton and Denton. Based on our assessment of today’s observations, we have seen the highest levels of family voting at any election in our 10 year history of observing elections in the UK.
Family voting is not a term I’ve heard of before, but it is the situation where two voters either confer, collude or direct each other on voting. And obviously cases where one voter oversees the votes of more than one other person as well.
Democracy Volunteers, the organization making the allegation, is a reputable decade plus old organization and not a partisan one.
Democracy Volunteers is run by Dr John Ault, a former Liberal Democrat politician who has observed elections in countries including Britain, Sweden, Norway and Finland.
They give more detail on their webpage
2023 saw the enactment of the Ballot Secrecy Act, which made the practice of family voting more clearly a breach of the secret ballot, making it more enforceable by staff in polling stations. Signage is now available to discourage the practice. Signage was only seen in 45% of the polling stations observed.
The observer team saw family voting in 15 of the 22 polling stations observed, some 32 cases in total, nine cases in one polling station alone. The team observed a sample of 545 voters casting their vote – meaning 12% of those voters observed either caused or were affected by family voting.
Commenting John Ault, Director of Democracy Volunteers said;
‘Today we have seen concerningly high levels of family voting in Gorton and Denton. Based on our assessment of today’s observations, we have seen the highest levels of family voting at any election in our 10 year history of observing elections in the UK.’
‘We rarely issue a report on the night of an election, but the data we have collected today on family voting, when compared to other recent by-elections, is extremely high.’
‘In the other recent Westminster parliamentary by-election in Runcorn and Helsby we saw family voting in 12% of polling stations, affecting 1% of voters. In Gorton and Denton, we observed family voting in 68% of polling stations, affecting 12% of those voters observed.’
[…]
The team also saw a number of voters taking photographs of their ballot papers and one voter being authorised to vote despite them already having been marked as voted earlier in the day.
What they do not say, unfortunately, is which polling stations they observed this in. We can guess. In fact the Torygraph reports that Reform has explicitly made the obvious accusation:
Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, said allegations of family voting raised “serious questions about the integrity of the democratic process in predominantly Muslim areas”.
If the numbers reported are extrapolated to the total number of votes cast then it is not impossible that the Green’s 4402 vote victory came from family voting as 12% of the total vote is 4417 votes. I think that may be overstating things, because 32 out of 545 is 5.9%. It’s only 12% if you double the number of voters and imply that basically every, say, husband ensured that his wife voted the same way. That of course ignores cases where voter H ensures that voters W, S and D all vote the same way and so on.
But whether or not the Greens would have scraped a win without this kind of assistance, and my guess is that they probably would have, this credible accusation is going to cause a lot of reaction and subsequent accusations of “Islamophobia” etc.
I anticipate a lot of pressure being placed on DV to either retract their statement or not provide details that could help fuel “sectarian division”. This will of course not work because we’ve seen all this before. Specifically those of us who are paying attention have seen numerous cases where people of “South Asian” origin have been involved in voting irregularities - in one case it was Asian A vs Asian B - and thus the likely accusations of Islamophobia, racism etc. are easy to rebut with evidence.
In the short term I anticipate this will help 2 Tier survive a bit longer because controversy about voting will take the spotlight off the collapse of the Labour vote. I doubt this will last. If (when) Labour lose massively in the May local elections, then I expect resignation pressure to be intense, but, assuming no further government cockups in the next couple of months1, he will probably stagger on until those elections.
Depending on the details of the full report from DV, we may well see Reform attempt to have the election anulled and have another one. I am sure they are talking to lawyers as I write this to see what legal options they have. I have no idea if this will succeed or not, but it will certainly draw more attention to the issue.
A more important consequence is that there will be close examination of the voting in those local elections. I anticipate a lot of requests for widespread election observers and/or other monitoring of the voting in May with requests to enforce the ban on family voting and, if those requests are seen to fail, attempts to have violators arrested and then probably disruption as one side or another takes offense. Which side causes the disturbance will of course depend heavily on whether the police attempt to arrest violators or not. My prediction is that the police will mostly not try arresting violators and that they will instead try arresting the people complaining about the family voting.
Bottom line: those May local elections may provide rather more fireworks than expected
Update: Rod Dreher has some discussion of the result here
In particular he links to this oped by Daniel Hannan in the Daily Mail which discusses the Muslim pandering of the Greens and others
I may be being optimistic here
There's the obvious joke that the US just did a decapitation strike on Iran, so Starmer must be worried about his next big Labour meeting.
The Muslims are apparently 45% of Gorton and Denton, but the Greens got 41%. The green colored facists and the green colored facists may well be in bed together, but it is not clear to me that if wives were being directed, that they would have otherwise preferred Reform or Conservative.
I think that the most that a redo would accomplish is shifting Labour votes to green.
I am an American, so I fundamentally disagree with the English when it comes to family voting being a violation of democracy.
(Note the lower cases. The actual parties would be upper case. This is talking about Americans using what words when. )
American democracy in England would potentially include a mob hanging Parliament.
Voting integrity with a complete absence of lynch mobs would be the American republican tradition.
So family voting in England is a violation of the English democratic tradition, and the American republican tradition.
But, republican and Republican mean quite a lot of different things to the English, Welsh, Irish and Scots.
I imagine that you are correct in all your assertions, and so the pantomime continues. Theatre descending into farce.