HACKNEY ELECTION FRAUD

HACKNEY ELECTION FRAUD Đ OVER THE TOP THIS TIME!

(The strange tale of Orntlekhe Opshtimen and Frumet Wertzberger)

Eyebrows have been raised this week with the circulation of a 200-page consultant's report looking at the state of Hackney's electoral register and analysing the recent council ward and mayoral elections which produced results so ludicrous that even some Labour hacks outside the borough were shocked (not so Tony Blair, apparently, who arrived in Shoreditch last week for a secret congratulatory meeting with Jules Pipe).

The paper's author, who signs himself Orntlekhe Opshtimen, claims to have been hired prior to the elections by 'some concerned individuals' and made his findings known to opposition parties and groups across the Borough. If this character is to be believed (and his name sounds suspiciously like an anagram to me!), local opposition politicians decided to blow the lid off the election fraud this time but bottled out at the last minute. Whether this was due to doubt or fear is not clear, but past experiences suggest that anyone posing a serious threat to the Labour establishment in Hackney would have very good cause to be frightened.

If you add together the feebleness of the opposition and the fear of Labour retribution, you arrive at an equation which makes me far more inclined to believe a rumour circulating on the street that a disaffected Labour Councillor is behind all of this and has commissioned the report and then leaked it under the cover of the opposition groups.

The other reason for opposition parties to bottle out of stating the obvious is, of course, their own shocking record of involvement in the dirty business. In certain circles, election fraud is known as 'Hackney prostitution', because it's the Borough's oldest profession. Geriatric members of the community tell you stories about misdeeds of ancient times over a Sunday lunchtime beer, but for most of us election fraud burst out of the closet in 2001 with the jailing of Conservative Councillor Isaac Liebowitz and Liberal Democrat Councillor Zev Lieberman for fraud in Northwold ward in 1998. Two other councillors, Ian Sharer (who remains a Hackney Councillor to this day) and Shahid Achhala were cleared on the judge's direction after the jury failed to reach verdicts and the prosecution declined to seek a retrial.

Whether Labour had joined the fraud game by 1998 is a matter of speculation, but their openness to dirty tactics at the time can be judged by the actions of their (then) recently recruited Political Assistant and current Chief Whip, Councillor Luke Akehurst. In that year he was reported in The Independent as having circulated a paper to Hackney Labour councillors and ward activists recommending dirty tactics such as offering pacts with the Liberal Democrats in order to subsequently attack them when they inevitably refused the deal and working with the Tories "because they tend to hate the Liberal Democrats as much as you do'.

Our friend 'Ornie' reports that he is unable to positively report evidence of election fraud in the Hackney elections, but he goes on to reveal a litany of anomalies in the register and election results that would make your blood curdle. Amongst the findings are:

á 76 addresses receiving duplicate polling cards with identical names and addresses;

á 636 voter registrations with identical names and the same address written differently (as in '239A' versus '239, Ground Floor Flat');

á Over 4,000 register entries with two or more identical uncommon names at more than one address (550 of these at three or more addresses;

á Three 'extended families' (Hindu, Sikh and Jewish) with a total of 62 members registered to vote 176 times on a 'round-robin' basis at 82 different properties;

á An increase in the Hackney electorate since 2005 so great that if it continues at the current exponential rate the entire world will live here by 2090 (no, don't worry, the place will still be quiet, they'll just need larger ballot boxes to put all the forged papers in!);

á A 35% increase in turnout for the mayoral election since 2002, against a 3% rise in electorate over the same period and an 11% increase in voting for Councillors;

á A first preference vote for Jules Pipe 51% higher than last time and so large that at least 2,159 voters went to the polls to vote for a Labour Mayor but at the same time voted for Councillors from another party or no Councillors at all;

á Almost inexplicable voting for Tory leader Andrew Boff, with a 66% increase in mayoral vote at the same time as losing his Council seat in Queensbridge with a massive 22% swing to Labour Đ despite the fact that Andrew is a lot more popular in Queensbridge than he is in northern wards such as New River, where Jewish Conservatives actively campaigned against him in the mayoral election on homophobic grounds;

á An inexplicably low 'average votes per voter' figure for voters in the Hackney council elections of just 2.67 out of the 3.0 maximum, compared with much more reasonable figures in other boroughs (2.89 in Islington, 2.83 in Southwark and 2.82 in Wandsworth);

á A comparative profile of vote share in the council and mayoral elections in Hackney that shows major differences between the council voting and the mayoral voting three times as great as those in neighbouring Newham;

á Ward results in which 'Labour total votes appear to have increased disproportionatelyÉ in wards where the party vote share was under threat';

á An unbelievably low first preference mayoral vote for well-known Independent candidate Hettie Peters who, despite an active 'battle bus' campaign with supporters drawn from every political camp in the Borough, managed only 2/3 of the vote achieved in 2002 by three competing and relatively unknown Independents.

So arrogant was the ruling Labour group that it planned its victory celebrations, invited Tony Blair to the borough and produced a victory banner for the Town Hall well in advance of the results. As for the citizenry, well who gives a damn? The council couldn't even be bothered to ensure that the election figures were announced correctly, with the result that five candidates had wrong vote totals posted on the council website and three turnout figures were wrong (one of them by 570).

It is clear from the report that the council has no intention of keeping a clean electoral register. 'Ornie' reports the case of the two Dixon sisters who were each sent duplicate postal voting forms in 2005 and complained to a Guardian journalist, who subsequently contacted the council and was told that this was a 'very rare occurrence'. Apparently they both received duplicate voting cards in 2006 as well, with the same spelling error on one of the four papers as last time.

The question to be asked about cleaning the register Đ when it's almost a trivial exercise these days with modern computers and software Đ is why don't they want to do it? The answer is that a dirty register provides a wealth of spare names and addresses needed for massive centralised fraud Đ and it's a lot easier than collecting names of dead residents from Abney Park cemetery gravestones, as happened in the old days.

'Ornie' has gone home now, supposedly to Vilnius (although other rumours say Tel Aviv), safe in the knowledge that he has not made any accusations and thereby not risked extradition to face charges trumped up by an angry Labour Party. Well he may be scared, by we're not. We'll say it outright Đ these elections were fraudulent and anyone who looks at the figures would come to the same conclusion.

As for poor old Frumet WertzbergerÉ she's just an innocent resident who happens to appear on the register at two different addresses, presumably because she moved. At least she's safe in the knowledge that she's the only Wertzberger in Hackney, so she's not likely to receive an unexpected visit from a long-lost Hackney-resident relative. Let's hope she also doesn't receive a visit from a Labour Party official, to ask whether she was involved in the leaking of the report.