Jim Allister

I respectfully suggest that there is probably an unknown hidden degree of personation. If a certain number of people are prosecuted, it does not mean that only that number of people are personating others. The way to rule out personation and present hurdles to it is to have voter ID. I really do not understand why anyone who wants a clean election, with only legitimate voters voting and only legitimate votes counted, would say, “We don’t want any protections to ensure that there’s no voter cheating.” Surely we should all want to be on the side of preventing cheating in elections. This really is the question: are we on the side of making it more difficult to cheat in an election, or on the side of making it easier? Surely we should all be on the side of making it more difficult. I therefore strongly defend voter ID. Returning to the core subject matter, it is fitting that in the week of Remembrance Day we are adding the veteran card to the ID list. I look forward to that happening in Northern Ireland as well, but I want to raise a point that a serving soldier sent me a message about, which also touches on voting. He wrote: “I just want to highlight a further issue that serving members of the Armed Forces when serving abroad can’t exercise their ability to vote due to the inefficiency of the now contracted British Forces Post Office. The length of time to request a postal vote”, which is how most service people vote, “and then to send your vote means you miss the deadline” often. He then cited all the countries where servicemen are. Some can be as far away as the Falklands, Germany, Poland or Africa. He asked why we cannot have more efficiency in getting postal votes out to service people and back. That seems a legitimate question. He went on: “Many other countries provide polling booths in their military bases or…in their embassies”. Why do we not do that, Minister? Why do we not go further for our service personnel serving abroad, to ensure that they participate in the democratic process, as they are entitled to? Those are important questions that need to be answered, and a matter to which this House should give some attention.