Fraud watch

There’s a whole load of new reports about possible election fraud:

In Bethnal Green and Bow, the Guardian reports that dozens of electors are registered at properties in Brick Lane which are in fact either business addresses or places where they lived years ago. This includes an address owned by Abdus Salique, “a local businessman and Labour supporter who recently hosted a lunch for the party’s candidate, Oona King, and the London mayor, Ken Livingstone”. “But when the Guardian visited the premises, a businessman who rents an office in the building said that none of those named lived there.” (Here’s another report on the same issue from the Evening Standard’s This Is London site.)

In Bradford, the BBC reports that one Jamshed Khan has been arrested in a postal-vote fraud investigation. Khan is a councillor in a marginal Labour ward.

Meanwhile, in Bedfordshire, it appears that certain Tories are up to one of their old tricks – “granny farming”, which is getting little old ladies to allow you to cast proxy votes on their behalf. (This also sometimes involves “the tipp-ex trick”, namely offering help in procuring postal votes, and then whiting out “postal” and writing “proxy” in its place – so they end up without a vote.) In this case, it’s a 77-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s disease who lives in a nursing home.