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Parliamentary Affairs Advance Access originally published online on July 12, 2006
Parliamentary Affairs 2006 59(4):654-667; doi:10.1093/pa/gsl020
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© The Author [2006]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

A Banana Republic? The Investigation into Electoral Fraud by the Birmingham Election Court

John Stewart

Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham.

In 2005 an election court was held in Birmingham to determine allegations about fraud in two wards in the 2004 local elections. It found there had been fraud and corruption on a massive scale and declared the election void. The court exposed major weaknesses in the system of postal voting, which had been extended by the introduction of postal voting on demand in 2000, but without safeguards for the integrity of the electoral system at both national and local level. This article describes the proceedings of the election court against the background of the postal voting arrangements and the Birmingham context. It shows how the judgment of the court and the publicity it generated brought the issue of postal voting on to the national political agenda during the 2005 general election campaign, leading to a Government commitment to legislate.


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