[garinda]

Originally Posted by jambutty

Well I’ve done my duty in the farce that they call a secret ballot.

My polling card had a number on it.
The list of voters for that area had my name against that number.
The voting slip had a number on the back and a numbered counterfoil.
The clerk wrote my polling list number against a list of voting slip numbers.
Thus it would be possible to relate a person’s vote to a particular person.

Not very secret is it?

Why all these inter-related numbers? We are told that it is to help to prevent voting fraud. Well maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t but it does compromise secrecy and that makes the secret ballot in the UK an out and out farce.

In this day and age with the advent of computers and text recognition software it would be possible for a database to be compiled of who votes for whom. Who knows if this has already been done but what’s the betting that some time in the not too distant future there will be a database of voters votes.

It does seem quite an antiquated system, and I can see were you are coming from when you suggest that a data base could be constructed from the idividually identifiable voting slips. I suppose at the moment it is the cheapest and easiest way to stop people abusing the system. Perhaps the introduction of identity cards could prevent this.