Postal Voting Reform under the Blair Government, 2000-2007
Author: Lang Kao
Abstract / Chinese PDF Download
After returning to power in 1997, the Blair government began to pursue a series of political reforms. Before long, improving the postal voting system became a key focus.
Voter turnouts had been falling throughout Western Europe for several decades, and the Labour government regarded the raising of turnouts as a way to develop a healthy democracy. The Blair government hoped to achieve this by making it easier to vote. In 2000, the Labour government eliminated various restrictions on postal voting by allowing postal voting on demand. From this time forward, postal voting became one of the possible ways to vote, and pilot schemes were carried out at the local level to test different voting methods.
The present article will focus on the Labour government’s active efforts from the year 2000 to reform the voting system. I will examine how the government introduced postal voting on demand, and then attempted to gradually introduce all-postal voting in local elections before reverting to postal voting on demand after the occurrence of voting fraud in 2004.
The present paper also analyzes how increasing public support in the UK for postal voting is affecting elections there.