Reply #24: Britain catches election fraud flu

[Melissa G]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=1332635&mesg_id=1333563
Thanks to Dancing Dave!
Mass ballot rigging taking hold in Britain


"Postmen threatened with death? Stolen votes? Bribery? The sort of mass ballot rigging usually seen in dodgy Third World regimes is taking hold in Britain. And the outcome of the General Election could be at stake. Malcolm Macalister Hall investigates
21 March 2005


It's a miserable, drizzling fag-end of a day as Mohammed Saeed drives around the streets of Bordesley Green, on Birmingham's east side, to show me the area that used to be his manor. Staring bleakly through the windscreen, he mutters darkly about being cheated.

It's pretty much like any inner city here - terraced houses, corner shops, a mosque, Somali restaurants, streets jammed with cars. Much of Birmingham's Kashmiri, Pakistani and Somali population live in this ward. Saeed, 40, used to be one of its councillors - until he lost his seat in last June's city council elections. "It was a very hard door-to-door campaign," Saeed says morosely. "And then the votes were stolen."

It's a startling claim - but he is not the only person making such charges. In fact, his complaints are part of what could be the biggest ballot-rigging scandal in Britain in a century. Over the past four weeks, a specially-convened election court in Birmingham has heard shocking allegations that, here in Bordesley Green and also in Aston, another inner-city ward, last year's council elections were rigged - on a grand scale."

Read all about it at http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?sto...