Crystal gazing - UPDATED

I've spent all afternoon in the shed polishing up this big crystal I found a few months back into a perfect sphere, and a short while ago I saw this in its depths. It's clearly a British election but I can't tell from the result if it's more likely to be from the past or the future.



Okay, yes it's obviously from the past - the late 1980s of course - but it's not a million miles or years away from the current election. Extra votes? Check.

Officials report a flood of postal vote applications in marginal seats. With the outcome of the closest election in a generation hanging in the balance, a few thousand ‘stolen’ votes there could determine who wins the keys to Downing Street.
Anti-sleaze campaigner Martin Bell said: ‘There is actually a possibility that the result of the election could be decided by electoral fraud. That’s pretty grim.
‘We are facing a situation where we can no longer trust the integrity of our electoral system. It was a huge mistake to extend the postal vote. It opened up our system to all kinds of frauds.’
Out of a total estimated electorate of 46million, 7million have registered for postal votes.
The Metropolitan Police are examining 28 claims of major abuses across 12 boroughs - with four separate investigations in Tower Hamlets, East London.
Labour supporters stand accused of packing the electoral roll at the last minute with relatives living overseas or simply inventing phantom voters.
Officials in Tower Hamlets received 5,166 new registrations just before the April 20 deadline, and there has been no time to check them all.
In Bethnal Green, it is feared the electoral register has been deliberately stacked with fictitious names.Yesterday the Mail visited one four-bedroom flat in the area where 18 men are apparently claiming a vote, all of whom registered within the past month.
The students living there were baffled by many of the names said to be residing with them. Another resident was surprised to learn that eight complete strangers were also registered as living in the small flat she shares with her partner.
Other addresses investigated by the Mail were linked to the Labour Party.
At a property in Rainhill Way, Bethnal Green, where Labour Party council election candidate Khales Uddin Ahmed lives with his family, seven adults have suddenly joined the electoral roll.

Blackadder would certainly approve.

Violence and intimidation? Yep, check.

... I explained I was a journalist for The Independent looking to speak to a man at an address in the area, who was standing as a candidate in the local elections, about allegations of postal vote fraud. "Can we see your note pad," the boy asked.

I declined and then the first punch came – landing straight on my nose, sending blood and tears streaming down my face. Then another. Then another.

I tried to protect myself but a fresh crop of attackers – I guess between four and six – joined in. As they knocked me to the ground one of them brought a traffic cone repeatedly down on the back of my head.

The Indy's Jerome Taylor is lucky he didn't accidentally, brutally batter himself to death while answering his mobile phone.

For all we know the election after the one after this might well have seats with one person casting 16,742 votes, though not as blatantly and certainly not because of any claimed confidence in the candidate. As it is if these reports are true and given that there are now 7 million postal registrations - and for comparison only 27 million voted in 2005 - then it's hard to believe this election is really going to meet the definition of 'free and fair'. Small wonder then that the Mail is also saying that:

... for the first time ever the Commonwealth is dispatching a group of election monitors – more used to supervising banana republics – to scrutinise the results on Thursday.

Still, give the government a break. They do plan to fix it after if they win.

LABOUR is planning to legislate to stop cheating in postal voting immediately after the general election in spite of repeated assurances from ministers that the present system is safe, The Times has learnt.

And to be fair the problem only came to light in early April, so they've not had enough time to... oh wait, no, that article's dated April 2005, just before the last general election. So five years ago did they try to sort it out back then and simply lived down to their usual inadequacy, or did they choose to do square root of fuck all in the knowledge that it could favour them now?

I'm sure they fucking will. Oh, how proud I feel to be British.


Belated H/T to Her Predatory Ambushness for the Indy link.


UPDATE - via Mr Eugenides, some gold standard Mashery.

"Many of the people we have concocted have still to make up their minds, but we believe that in the last 48 hours we can imagine we are persuading some of them to vote tactically.

"If successful we can create a permanent alliance of progressive fraud that can finally stitch-up the voting system and fill the House of Lords with democratically elected thieves."