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

[Nicholas Bohm]

At 23:02 20/03/2003 +0000, Roger Hird wrote:

>In article <ACTIVERFNT1f2LTrpwA0000008b@activerfnt1.activerf.com>,
>    Brian Morrison <bdm@fenrir.org.uk> wrote:
> > >
> > >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?
>
>I don't know the answer to your question but (i) as I understand it in
>England and Wales such investigations are started by petitions (to the
>Clerk of the Crown?) on behalf of the aggrieved candidate and

I think Election Petitions are addressed to the High Court (like e.g. 
Company Winding-Up Petitions) as a means of commencing legal proceedings to 
dispute the result of an election.  The grounds may be quite different from 
the kinds of fraud under discussion in this thread (mishandling of a 
candidate's election expenses, for example).

Only if the resulting proceedings suggest "vote-rigging" offences would it 
lead to a criminal investigation by the police, and indeed such an 
investigation might be undertaken quite independently of any election petition.

>(ii) if you
>talked to people in Northern Ireland 30 or so years ago, just before the
>present "troubles" started, they would say that the main parties (in those
>days the Ulster Unionists and the Nationalists) both went along with a
>sort of carve-up where within unwritten but acknowledged boundaries
>neither complained about what the other was doing.  So if the NI rules are
>the same as the English and Welsh ones, as long as the parties turned a
>blind eye nothing was done about electoral fraud.

I'm sure this is right.  It would certainly be interesting to know how 
often and with what consequences it has been necessary for the ballot 
papers to be inspected and any use made of the numbers appearing on 
them:  this might cast some light on the usefulness of the numbers 
(although it can no doubt be argued that even if they are never used, their 
presence has been foiling some crime that might otherwise have been taking 
place; an argument conveniently incapable of factual rebuttal).

Regards

Nicholas

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