[chicmac]

I see there is a net rumour on other forums that Opt2Vote, the people who organised the postal voting in Glenrothes was set up in Londonderry by Labour.  Does anyone know if this is true?

e.g.1 Allegedly from Private Eye in April (my highlights):

"Vote Fraud

Voting is how the people get to choose who will run the country. Fraud is how the politicians get to choose who gets chosen. Fraudulent voting is illegal. However making it easy is not. That is one reason that they get away with it. Then of course they make the arrangements for their expenses and it is snouts in the trough time again. Here Private Eye tells us more. It is once more the solitary voice telling the truth in a wilderness of lies. I can say as a matter of direct knowledge that Lewisham council make it as easy as possible for illegal immigrants to register as voters and to lie their way out of it should the facts come to light. In fact the Eye is understating the problem. But a problem for some is a solution for others, such as the crooks who run the Labour Party



ELECTIVE SURGERY
BURIED in the small print of the Political Parties and Elections Bill is a huge and unexpected concession from the Labour government. For years it has been debasing the electoral process by making it as easy as possible for the fraudulent to get postal votes. Now it seems to have had a Damascene conversion.

As conventional wisdom runs that the larger the turnout the better Labour does, the party has thrown away safeguards and debauched the ballot as it tried to pull in as many voters as possible. In 2005, the electoral commissioner Richard Mawrey QC ruled that Birmingham had a system that was "wide open to fraud". Upholding claims from the Liberal Democrats that Labour activists were using postal votes to rig an election, he declared that "short of writing 'Steal Me' on the envelopes, it is hard to see what more could be done to ensure their coming into the wrong hands."

Last year in Slough, a special election court convicted Tory councillor Eshaq Khan of using bogus postal votes to beat Lydia Simmons, a former mayor of Slough, by 119 votes to win the council's central ward. Sir Christopher Kelly, chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, said the Slough fraud highlighted the need for fundamental changes.

"Electoral fraud is not a trivial matter - it is an affront to the democratic principle of one person one vote," he said. "Left unchecked, it will eventually undermine trust and confidence in the democratic process and by implication the electorate's consent to the outcome of elections."

The government seemed to have no interest in changing a system that suited its interests. Until March, that is, when without warning it agreed to the demands of Sir Christopher, the Electoral Commission and every other independent observer for reform. The present system is a joy for gerrymanderers and bullying men who want to make sure their wives and grown-up children vote the way they want.

In future, people will not be able to apply for a fistful of ballots on behalf of others. Individuals will have to take personal responsibility for registering and provide evidence that returning officers can check that they are who they say they are.

There's only one snag. The new, clean system will not be in place until 2014, or maybe later. The last possible date of the next general election is 3 June 2010. Like St Augustine, Labour wants to be pure ~ but not yet!

Meanwhile, back in the real world, polling experts are looking with horror at the explosion of under-regulated postal voting that Gordon Brown will allow as he tries to hold on to power. What was once a small part of the electoral process is now a big business. Labour has created a company based in Londonderry, the illiterately titled Opt2Vote Ltd, which boasts that it "specialises in designing and delivering a range of solutions to address the changing needs of the UK electoral services market". In three years it has dealt with a staggering 10m postal votes.

Mike Smithson. the polling guru who runs the website politicalcbetting.com, told the Eye that the fact that votes were now a money-making opportunity showed that Labour had created a system beyond the control of returning officers. There were too many postal votes for them to cope with.

"Returning officers and their staff have local knowledge," he said. "If 10 people register at a terraced house they know can only sleep three, they will be suspicious. How can a company based in Londonderry spot potential frauds?"

To which the answer is that Labour does not want the ballot processors in Northern Ireland to spot potential frauds, not at least until the next election is safely out of the way.

'Ratbiter' "



e.g.2  from the SUBROSA Blog:

"'Opt2vote is a partner company of Northgate, which hosts Labour sites such as www.davethechameleon.com and www.labour.org.uk


The Open Rights Group had this to say about Opt2vote

ORG was unable to examine or verify the servers or systems they used in any meaningful sense. While ORG considers that the physical security for the ES&S and Tata locations was reasonable—and very good for the OPT2VOTE location observed —ORG is unable to comment further on the servers. Without more information on the specifications of the systems and clear rules on the access observers could request in pilot situations, ORG was restricted to what the suppliers were willing to offer or what their clients were willing to support. No matter what access was provided, fundamentally the servers are opaque to the human eye. No observer would be able to examine what the server was doing, what data it was sending and receiving or whether problems were occurring, without detailed technical access to the software and its operating system, yet it would be inappropriate and is clearly against guidelines for observers to handle anything to do with the running of the election. Hence ORG must conclude that the servers and their operations were—and will remain in future elections—unobservable."





I did a little bit of digging on the web myself and found the following,
prefixed with the obligatory 'allegedly':

Opt2Vote's legitimacy was queried by an independent monitoring watchdog.

The Open Rights Group say that Opt2Vote uses 'opaque' servers for its database and that it does not fulfill the observablity requirements of an electoral procedure.

Opt2Vote is a partner company of Northgate Information Solutions.

Northgate do a lot of work for the government and host the Labour Party website.

A former head of security in MI5, Sir Stephan Lander, was given a senior appointment by the Labour Government to head up SOCA while a non-exec-director of Northgate.

The NuLabour website suggests this constituted a conflict of interest between Northgate and Labour (and therefore presumably between Opt2Vote and Labour now also.)

Anybody got any other info?

[Shagpile]

No disrespect mate.......

I've never trusted this result!

Ooops lost! But by the court...... well that's ok then  

Election fraud by postal votes..... when the irregularity has been uncovered, well, normal response is to increase the option for postal votes.

Yeah, yeah........

Does anyone know where I can get a gun?

[Shagpile]

And the Wesstern world bleats aboy Iran's Election..............

What about OUR PROCESS?

[Aventinian]

[Shagpile]

[Shagpile]

Another reason why Chick should not quit.