YOUR VOTE CAN BE TRACED
Our vote in General and Local Elections can be traced back to the person who marked the voting paper. The number on the voting paper appears on the counterfoil on which your name appears.
With postal voting your name and date of birth is on a detachable slip with the same number on both.
What happens to the voting slips used in British elections after they have been counted?
UNDER the Representation of the People Act 1983 the Returning Officer, usually a senior official of the local council, has to ensure that all ballot papers, counterfoils and the polling clerks' marked copies of the electoral register are safely deposited with the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery (a senior officer of the Lord Chancellor's Department). This is so that if any corrupt or illegal election practices are reported the appropriate documents are available for inspection
All such documents are supposed to be officially sealed so that there is no chance of interference by any party and, according to the 1983 act, the seal can only be broken by the order of the High Court or Parliament itself.
In practice ballot papers are simply bundled-up into paper sacks and transported to a warehouse in Hayes, Middlesex, for the statutory period of one year and one day.
Following the 1987 general election, I reported on the disposal of the 7,000 sacks of this 'low-grade confidential waste' for a national newspaper. The papers were transported by truck from the Hayes warehouse to be incinerated in the North London Waste Authority plant at Enfield. During that process we witnessed dozens of sacks splitting and many hundreds of spent ballot papers spilling for all to see. This adds weight to the conspiracy theory that security around the election documents is very lax, and that the vote-tracing procedure has been used to identify people voting for fringe candidates.
Votes can be traced by matching the numbered ballot paper to its similarly numbered counterfoil; the numbered counterfoil also bears the voter's registration number from the electoral register which is hand-written by the Polling Clerk when the ballot paper is issued.
As all the ballot papers for each candidate - including fringe candidates such as Sinn Fein, communists, fascists, nationalists, etc. - are bundled together, anyone having access to those documents can speedily trace the name and address of every voter for such candidates.
David Northmore, Author of The Freedom Of Information Handbook,
