Crime

I was moved this morning to look up the penalties associated with making a false declaration regarding the register of electors. Google, with his usual efficiency comes up with the goods after a few clicks, yielding the user friendly summary at reference 1 (illustrated) and the lawyer friendly recipe at reference 2.

As I thought, the law take such false declaration seriously with a penalty of a fine (presumably substantial) or six months imprisonment (but not both) available to the courts. Part of this is, I think, the need to impose fierce penalties for offences which are easy to commit and hard to detect. Offences because the electoral register is the foundation of our democratic life and it is important that we take it seriously and that it is accurate. It should not be brought into disrepute; we are not the Balkans or Central Africa.

That said, it seems that the consolidation illustrated above was motivated more by the current interest in identity theft for the purposes of monetary gain rather than for the purposes of electoral gain. Maybe the state of the nation is such that, the inhabitants of a few rotten apples among inner city wards apart, not enough people care seriously enough about elections to deliberately go about corrupting the process. Politicians are far too corrupt anyway for us to bother about corrupting the process by which they get to be elected. A caricature of our politicians perhaps, but a common enough sentiment at the bar of TB.

Other angles might be the desire to avoid jury service or a more general desire to be invisible to the authorities. Who knows what one branch of government might say to another branch of government, despite all those protestations to the contrary.

Reference 1: http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/d_to_g/election_offences/#a04.

Reference 2: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1983/2.