Political Corruption in Muslim Communities Undermining UK Election

Cultural Enrichment Alert – The BBC seems to think it’s some kind of quaint ethnic custom. But in a serious development today in arguably one of Britain’s most corrupt constituencies, yet more evidence is surfacing that electoral fraud, particularly that relating to postal votes in Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities in Britain, is becoming widespread, as this breaking story illustrates:

Scotland Yard has launched criminal investigations into four allegations of bogus voter registration.

Bundles of fictitious names have been put on the electoral roll in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in what looks like a blatant attempt to steal the elections.

It will raise concern in an area notorious for election fraud and where a last-minute flood of applications to vote mean that more than 5,000 have been accepted without any checks — enough to sway Thursday’s results.The council tried to clean up the register.

Officials visited any home with nine or more voters and removed 141 names from the roll.

But a surge of 5,166 new registrations were received just before the deadline of April 20 and there was no time to check them. Alarm bells rang when parties were given lists of postal voters to help with electioneering.

At an address in Bethnal Green Road consisting of a ground-floor shop and an upstairs maisonette, eight Bengalis claimed a postal vote.

However, when The Times called there this week there was only one occupant, Inge Reekmans a Belgian photographer. “You’re kidding,” she said when told about the registrations.

Showing The Times around her home, the only other occupant was her cat Kiki. “You can see, there are no Bengalis,” she said.

In Goldman Close, there were 10 Bengali names for a house where Stephane Leyvraz, a Frenchman, lives with two Europeans. When The Times visited, there was no sign of “Tanzir Alam”, “Nurul Aman” or the others. A man came for the ballot papers on Monday.

Across Tower Hamlets in Bromley-by-Bow, 18 people apparently requested postal votes in a four-bedroom house where Ali Saleem, a Pakistani student, lives with four companions. Does he vote? “Not even in my own country,” he said. “I don’t like to vote.”

The Electoral Commission’s Code of Conduct for postal voting forbids campaigners from soliciting ballot papers. But Mahmodul Hasam Talukdar was asked for his by a party supporter. “He said ‘Vote for us and I will take it back to the post office’,” Mr Talukdar, 23, a student from Bangladesh, said. “Why should I? It’s my vote.”

Britain boasts one of the world’s freest and most transparent electoral systems.

But is is being slowly and steadily undermined and abused, particularly by Muslim immigrant communities.

In 2007 the Joseph Rowtree Foundation, an independent organisation which promotes electoral reform and democratic rights, said:

“several cases [of electoral fraud] have involved proven instances of large-scale vote-rigging within British Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that practices associated with traditional forms of Pakistani ‘clan politics’ have been a common factor in a significant minority of recent prosecutions for electoral fraud”

In Slough, Berkshire last year, Six British Pakistanis were jailed for postal vote abuse.

In an earlier case in 2005, local elections were voided and had to be re-run at a massive cost to the taxpayer, as several Pakistani candidates were found to be operating what was described as a ‘vote-rigging factory’.

The judge commented on government claims at the time that postal voting was working:
“Anybody who has sat through the case I have just tried and listened to evidence of electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic would find this statement surprising.”

But as we often say here at Un:dhimmi, it is unfair to transfer all the blame to the miscreants. Equally culpable are the enablers – and here it is once again the political class in the UK, who still maintain that the lax security in British elections (particularly those around postal voting) do not require reform.

It is clear that a workable alternative to postal voting has to be found, arrangements to protect abuse of postal voting from Britain and abroad put in place – and that in-person voters should have to identify themselves to electoral offices, which, bizarrely, is not currently the case in Britain.