Anyone know more about this BT "uk identity verification" scheme?

[Brian Beesley]

On Thursday 20 March 2003 16:39, Brian Morrison wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Mar 2003 15:24:08 +0000, Roland Perry wrote:
> >In message <3E79CBBD.17410.13C15B0@localhost>, David Hansen
> ><davidh@spidacom.co.uk> writes
> >
> >>Nobody has yet managed to tell me what use numbered ballot papers
> >>would be in a criminal investigation.
> >
> >You'd be investigating a crime of a kind broadly described as "vote
> >rigging".
>
> How many investigations of this nature have there been in Northern
> Ireland, a place where ballot rigging is reputed to occur regularly?

Not very many - if any. The ballot rigging which goes on (and everyone agrees 
on this) is more a question of "personation". The standard techniques are to 
register spurious voters in order to acquire multiple votes. I'll be _very_ 
interested to see what effect the changes in the compilation of the electoral 
register have at the next election - these changes were put in place to clamp 
down on these practises - as usual there appear to be loopholes, but Sinn 
Fein/IRA are known to be furious that they have "lost" 120,000 votes.

The point is that marking ballot papers does not ensure that people do not 
vote more than once, or in the names of people whose identities they have 
stolen or who do not exist. These controls should be applied at the point 
before people get their hands on a ballot paper. Some sort of indelible 
marking would seem to be a Good Idea - it would certainly make life more 
difficult for the vans full of people I've seen driving from polling station 
to polling station during past elections. (The counter to this is that 
sometimes paramiltary organizations have instructed people in their 
communities to boycott elections, so that even information as to which people 
have voted - without any means of identifying which candidates they may have 
voted for - might be dangerous.)

The only conceivable use of marking ballot papers is to be able to compile 
lists of who voted for which candidate - thus destroying the secrecy of the 
ballot. I'm not saying that this _does_ happen (though in the NI security 
context I'd be amazed if it didn't), or that the information gained from 
marking ballot papers is used to target individuals - it's just that it 
_might_ be. I get more worried about that by the day, especially now that our 
own Prime Minister is IMO a war criminal, no better than Saddam Hussein or 
Adolf Hitler, even if possibly less dangerous than the latter.

Brian Beesley