Dave Levy has got a good discussion going on at [blogs.sun.com]

…no ID is required to vote, you only have to assert your identity (Remeber this if you loose your polling card). If someone else has claimed your vote before you, then you will be given a pink ballot paper and your vote counted. Counting staff and the candidate counting agents can easily see if there are large numbers of duplicate votes.

On the other hand, lets see how someone could find out how you voted. They’d need the electoral register, (this is easy, its a public document), the counterfoils and ballot papers (these are kept in secure places which they’d need a court order to legally access). The electoral count does not sort the ballot papers, and the ballot paper was given to you when you turned up. Does your electoral stalker know when you voted? Otherwise, they’ll have to inspect all thirty to forty thousand counterfoils until they find yours.

…which is in response to something Robin Wilton wrote at [blogs.sun.com]

Although Dave is correct he does seem to have fallen for the fallacy of the individual, ie: that people care about in which direction a particular person has voted, and that this is a particularly hard thing to reverse (something that I don’t wholly agree with anyway, having made a career of sifting small bits of data out of apparently infeasibly large ones).

What is obvious is that at the end of an election there will be neat piles of all the votes made for Sinn Fein, the CPB, the BNP, UKIP, Greens, Animal Rights and other political parties which might attract the sort of people that a Government would like to watch.

A simple lookup-process then suffices to create a watch list.

Therefore I suggest that this is a somewhat oppressive measure that is a brake upon the democratic process, in that there is no knowledge about how the data of who-voted-for-whom may be used.

One possible solution: move to a proportionally-represented parliament where such political support could be balanced by the mainstream (“Yerr, oi voted 80% Conservative and 20% Green laast toime“, or somesuch) – but personally I wouldn’t like to have that as a lower house of Parliament; the measure would at least dilute charges of extremism against the individual.

I would like to replace the Lords with a large, strongly mandated and wholly “PR” upper chamber, but that’s a different matter.