Every postal vote is checked against a signature and a date of birth held on file, and the check is done on all of them, not a sample. This one matches, every time, and the letterbox it is posted from is boarded over.
I am an electoral services officer for a district council. Fourteen years, eleven elections.
How the register is built, because people assume it is a list somebody copies forward.
Every year there is a canvass. A form goes to every property, it comes back, and where it does not come back we send a reminder, then another, then a canvasser to the door. A property that does not respond gets removed after two years. The register is republished on the first of December and we publish the number of electors to the Cabinet Office.
Postal voting is the part with the real teeth. When you apply you give your signature and your date of birth. Those go on a record. When your ballot comes back it is in an envelope with a postal voting statement, and you have written your signature and your date of birth on that statement.
Every single statement is checked against the record by software and then by a human where the software is unsure. Not a sample. All of them. A mismatch means the ballot is rejected and a letter goes to the elector, and the rejections are reported.
14 Mill Row has one registered elector.
The house is boarded. It has been boarded since 2009, when the owner died and the estate went into a dispute that has never resolved, and the windows have steel on the ground floor and the front door has a plate over it with a letterplate cut into the plate.
The elector is registered, has a postal vote, and votes.
Eleven elections. Nine postal ballots returned, two not.
Every one of the nine passed the identifier check. Signature and date of birth, matched against the record, by software and in four cases by me personally because I pulled them deliberately.
What the canvass does, which is the part I find hardest to explain to people who do not do this job.
The form comes back.
Filled in, in pen, with the one name on it, signed and dated. It comes back by post in the prepaid envelope.
Twice I have sent a canvasser because I wanted a human at that door. Both came back and wrote no response in the box, which is what you write when nobody answers, and one of them added that the property appears derelict.
So the record shows a property where the canvasser finds nobody and the form comes back anyway.
What has been done about it through the proper channels, and I want to set this out because it looks like negligence and it is not.
I referred it for investigation in 2015. Electoral fraud is a police matter and it went to the force's single point of contact, who took it seriously, and an officer visited the property twice.
The report says the property is secure, there are no signs of occupation or forced entry, there is mail inside the letterplate cage visible through the slot, and no offence could be evidenced.
I reviewed the registration myself in 2017 under the correct procedure, which means writing to the elector at that address requiring evidence of entitlement.
They wrote back. Within the deadline. With a signature that matched the record.
You cannot remove an elector who responds to a review. That is not discretion, it is the law, and the law is written that way for reasons I entirely support, because the alternative is an official striking people off on a hunch.
What I have checked myself, out of hours, because it is my name on the register.
The name is not on the deeds, which are public. The name is not the name of the owner who died and it is not a family name in any of the probate papers I can see.
The name appears on that register for the first time in 2011 and it has been continuous since.
It does not appear on any other register in this district, and I have searched all of them, which I am allowed to do and which took an afternoon.
What I do on polling day.
Nothing different. The ballot is issued, it comes back, it is verified, it is counted.
I want to say plainly that no election in this district has ever been close enough for one vote to matter, and that if one were, the vote would still be counted, because a ballot that passes verification is a valid ballot and my job is to apply the rules and not to decide who is real.
The one thing I have changed is mine and it is small.
The opening of postal votes happens in a room in the council offices with agents present, and the statements are separated from the ballots and the identifiers are checked at a bank of screens.
I used to do the manual checks myself in a batch at the end.
Since 2019 I have done 14 Mill Row first, in the morning, with the room full and the agents watching and two members of my team either side of me.
The reason is the 2019 statement. They are all in storage and I have looked at all nine of them and they are identical, the same hand, the same pressure, the same slightly rising line.
On the 2019 one the date of birth is written in the box and then, in the space under the signature where nothing is printed and nothing is asked for, there is a line of writing in the same pen.
It gives the address as 14 Mill Row and then the words top floor, which that house does not have, because it is a two storey terrace, and I have the 1970s building control file and a police officer's word for it.