The term “family voting” is a bit like “family milk chocolate” — it’s a euphemistic term for something that’s bordering on toxic that you shouldn’t swallow.
First let me start with a mea culpa. When Democracy Volunteers released it’s statement immediately after the close of polls for the Gordon and Denton by-election last week, my assumption was that it should be taken seriously. As someone who used to work in democratic reform, I’d been aware of the organisation for a while, and I’ve known John Ault (who, like me, was formerly a Lib Dem campaigner) for over 30 years.
What’s more I know the constituency — or at least large parts of it — and it was plausible to me that there might have been an issue based on my thoroughly out of date experiences. A lot of people get very self-righteous about suggestions of coercion within ethnic minority communities, but the people that have spoken out about biraderi networks unduly influencing elections (and who can stand in them) have been members of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities themselves.
I was a campaigner — first as a volunteer and then professionally — in Manchester and Leeds throughout my early political career, and met numerous people of South Asian origin who felt they had been excluded from being able to participate in the political process because their face didn’t fit inside of their own communities.
It isn’t widely understood, but one of the ways in which George Galloway pulled off his 2012 by-election win in Bradford West was by leveraging discontent among young and women voters sick of clan politics (although it would be a stretch to suggest he was doing this for anything other than opportunist reasons). Indeed, my perception is that the influence of such networks has declined in recent years, partly as later generations grew in influence, and partly because of disaffection with the Labour Party following the Iraq War. But there have been incidents in more recent years, such as in Tower Hamlets.
But if there is evidence of widespread coercive voting in the Gorton and Denton, the evidence is pretty thin on the ground. Democracy Volunteers themselves have come up with a figure of 12% of votes being cast by “family voting”, but that figure immediately comes down to 6% when you bear in mind that at most half of those votes were cast by people who were allegedly doing the coercing. And what do they mean by “family voting”?
Frustratingly, Democracy Volunteers doesn’t have a definition on an easy to find place on their website, but digging through some old reports, I found this defintion in one of their reports (their reports are apparently in PDF format but have been embedded in horrible reader applications which you can’t download from — at least not on my browser), provided by the United Nations Development programme:
…family voting refers to the situation in which the heads of family (often extended family and often male heads of family influence other family members in how they cast a vote…Family voting can be a serious violation, especially when it is malicious, i.e., when it is carried out with the intent of influencing or removing the freedom of choice of a voter. In these cases, family voting violates the central principle of voter secrecy….. family voting often stops women from casting a vote of their own choice.
In many situations, while the woman physically casts her own vote, she is under a strong cultural expectation to obey her husband or father and vote for the candidate or party that she has been instructed to vote for. The influence may extend to accompanying the female family members to the voting centre in order to oversee the casting of the vote.
There’s a lot of qualifiers in that defintion. The same report also provides a list of categories (undefined): “clear direction”, “general oversight”, “collusion” and “other”. Of those, “clear direction” sounds potentially concerning, “general oversight” could suggest coercion but could be entirely innocent, while “collusion” (which in that particular report counted for 41.4% of incidents) sounds pretty innocuous. I collude with my wife all the time when voting; we often discuss the most effective way to vote. There’s no suggestion that either of us can dictate terms to the other. I hate to tell you this, but tactical voting is by definition colluding with other people.
Very quickly, when you break down “family voting” by Democracy Volunteers’ own defintions, that “12%” figure starts to look closer to 1%. Based on my (wholly out of date) perception of some of those Muslim areas in places like Levenshulme, that actually sounds surprisingly small. By any definition it wasn’t a decisive factor in the election. Of course, we can’t know what goes on behind closed doors with postal votes, but even then this only accounted for a quarter of the votes.
It is certainly the case that up until election night, this was not reported as the kind of ethnically-charged by-election that we saw in, say Bradford West or Batley and Spen. Rather, it appears to have only really arisen after the polls closed. In any case, the idea that a secretive network of conservative Muslims were coordinating the election result to support a white woman, whose party leader is a Jewish gay man, and whose policies are pro-LGBTQ+, stretches credibility to breaking point.
I have to question the wisdom of John Ault and Democracy Volunteers’ decision to issue a statement so soon after polling had closed. They clearly knew that it would have dominated the discourse between close of polls and the result being declared, and that bad actors were all too eager to run with it. To their credit, I can’t find anything in their previous reports to suggest that they have are suggesting any particular ethnic angle on there, but its there to be inferred if they you want to read between the lines. The fact that five days later they have yet to issue a clarifying statement, particularly after the short shrift they were given by the Manchester returning officer, is extraordinary. It appears that they have gone to ground.
I think the lesson to all this is that just because you think you have a major story, and that you can get a lot of attention by releasing it at the right time, it doesn’t mean you should rush ahead without thinking it through first. This innuendo is going to be used by every Trump-inspired UK politician for years to come and the damage it will cause to harming trust in the political process and good relations with the South Asian community, is unacceptable.
Update: Democracy Volunteers have finally made another statement. It isn’t worth a full rebuttal, mainly because it doesn’t address any of the criticisms they have received for why they chose to release their statement when they did and invite claims that the Gorton and Denton poll had been rigged in some way. They don’t even address the points made by the Manchester returning officer.
It is notable that they continue to conflate potential coercion — a serious matter — with “collusion” — which could essentially mean anything.
In hindsight, I should have included this comment by Lord Hayward, from the Manchester Evening News article I linked to above (my emphasis):
Lord Hayward, a former advisor to Democracy Volunteers, said while the claims of family voting were concerning he believed there was ‘no way you could suggest that the election has been stolen‘. He added: “The sheer size of the majority means [family voting] does not come into it. There is no doubt in my mind, or in the mind of any reasonable person, that the Greens won this election absolutely clearly.”
Would it have been so difficult for John Ault to say the same this evening? His research is being used by Reform and the Conservatives to allege the exact opposite, so such an intervention would seem warranted.
We can have a grown up debate about the nature of the secret ballot and the value of polling stations placing greater emphasis on the need for people to cast their own votes, but the statements by Democracy Volunteers this week aren’t that.
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