Birmingham City Council has admitted that polling station staff witnessed illegal family voting attempts during the May local elections.
This illegal practice - when relatives or other voters enter the polling booth together and influence how someone casts their ballot - was relatively unheard of until recently. But it is increasingly posing a threat to British elections.
Pressed by the Daily Mail under the Freedom of Information Act, Birmingham City Council revealed that officials were forced to step in, after groups of voters tried to enter polling booths together. When staff told them this was not allowed, they were in some cases met with verbal abuse and aggressive behaviour.
A Reform UK spokesman said that this admission “confirms what many people already knew” about the spread of family voting. “If this is what is happening inside polling stations, just imagine the potential for coercion with postal votes behind closed doors.”
Nigel Farage has been highlighting this for years. And these concerns were brought into sharp focus following the Gorton and Denton by-election earlier this year. Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin came from nowhere to beat the Labour Party in its former safe seat, but the by-election was won by the Greens with a campaign focused on getting out the Muslim vote - a result made more dubious by allegations of family voting.
Speaking at a press event in Makerfield this week, before the Birmingham revelations, Farage reminded people that an independent observer group had witnessed family voting in 58% of polling stations in Gorton and Denton. There were instances where “women were dragged in [to the polling booth], watched over whilst they voted, a photograph taken of the ballot paper and that photograph then sent on. That was an abomination.”
Worse still, the authorities failed to act. “What did Greater Manchester Police do?” Farage asked. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
Farage also warned that family voting is only the visible part of a much wider problem: “If you think that’s bad, just think of the levels of fraud and intimidation that go on with postal voting.”
As Farage put it, “the privacy of the polling booth was supposed to be a place of sanctity”. That is why the secret ballot has been protected in Britain since the 1872 Ballot Act - it was supposed to stop voters being bullied, bribed or intimidated at the ballot box.
But Farage, who has been sounding the alarm on this issue since 2015, reiterated that today, “our voting system is rotten in places”. While he remains “absolutely convinced [Reform UK] won Gorton and Denton among British-born people”, the rest of the electorate is more problematic. “Whilst Commonwealth voting might have worked in decades gone by, it doesn’t work in an age of mass migration.” He pointed out that there were plenty of people in Gorton and Denton who had recently arrived in Britain as part of the Tories’ “Boriswave” of mass immigration from the developing world and couldn’t speak English.
This is significant because family voting is, as Farage wrote on social media today, “rife in Britain’s Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. With the rising influence of sectarian voting, this practice may have a real effect on the results of elections.”
This illegal practice - when relatives or other voters enter the polling booth together and influence how someone casts their ballot - was relatively unheard of until recently. But it is increasingly posing a threat to British elections.
Pressed by the Daily Mail under the Freedom of Information Act, Birmingham City Council revealed that officials were forced to step in, after groups of voters tried to enter polling booths together. When staff told them this was not allowed, they were in some cases met with verbal abuse and aggressive behaviour.
A Reform UK spokesman said that this admission “confirms what many people already knew” about the spread of family voting. “If this is what is happening inside polling stations, just imagine the potential for coercion with postal votes behind closed doors.”
Nigel Farage has been highlighting this for years. And these concerns were brought into sharp focus following the Gorton and Denton by-election earlier this year. Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin came from nowhere to beat the Labour Party in its former safe seat, but the by-election was won by the Greens with a campaign focused on getting out the Muslim vote - a result made more dubious by allegations of family voting.
Speaking at a press event in Makerfield this week, before the Birmingham revelations, Farage reminded people that an independent observer group had witnessed family voting in 58% of polling stations in Gorton and Denton. There were instances where “women were dragged in [to the polling booth], watched over whilst they voted, a photograph taken of the ballot paper and that photograph then sent on. That was an abomination.”
Worse still, the authorities failed to act. “What did Greater Manchester Police do?” Farage asked. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
Farage also warned that family voting is only the visible part of a much wider problem: “If you think that’s bad, just think of the levels of fraud and intimidation that go on with postal voting.”
As Farage put it, “the privacy of the polling booth was supposed to be a place of sanctity”. That is why the secret ballot has been protected in Britain since the 1872 Ballot Act - it was supposed to stop voters being bullied, bribed or intimidated at the ballot box.
But Farage, who has been sounding the alarm on this issue since 2015, reiterated that today, “our voting system is rotten in places”. While he remains “absolutely convinced [Reform UK] won Gorton and Denton among British-born people”, the rest of the electorate is more problematic. “Whilst Commonwealth voting might have worked in decades gone by, it doesn’t work in an age of mass migration.” He pointed out that there were plenty of people in Gorton and Denton who had recently arrived in Britain as part of the Tories’ “Boriswave” of mass immigration from the developing world and couldn’t speak English.
This is significant because family voting is, as Farage wrote on social media today, “rife in Britain’s Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. With the rising influence of sectarian voting, this practice may have a real effect on the results of elections.”
