The shame of Royal Mail’s postal vote delay

Britain’s creaking infrastructure and frequent paralysis of public services deserved to be a bigger factor in the election campaign than it has been. But could it now actually affect the result by disenfranchising some voters?

A growing number of voters have complained about failing to receive their ballot papers in the post. Given that many people requested postal votes because they knew they were going to be away from home this week, it will now be too late for them to vote, even if delays are sorted out at the last moment.

It is not just ballot papers, either, which have been delayed. Until last Monday I had not received a single election communication through the post – the mailshots candidates are allowed to send at public expense. Then, suddenly, came a rush of them all at once. Other people I have spoken to have reported a similar absence of mailshots in the first four weeks of the campaign. I am not claiming that they make great reading or have contributed to helping me – or many other people – make up their minds, but these communications will have come too late for many postal voters.

Come Friday, and the late arrival of postal ballots threatens to become a major scandal. What if bags of ballot papers start arriving at council offices at the same time as Keir Starmer – or Rishi Sunak, or someone else – is heading to the Palace to be asked to form a new government?

At the heart of this is a remarkable growth in postal voting. While volumes of mail have fallen dramatically in recent years, the postal service is playing an ever-greater role in our democratic process. In 2019, 6.9 million votes – 21 per cent of the total – were postal votes. Yet these votes are being handled by a company which is trying to wriggle out of its public service obligation to provide a six-day-a-week universal postal service to every address in the country. That’s without also mentioning that it is about to be sold to a Czech private equity firm which is sure to try to excuse itself to an even greater extent from having to provide a universal postal service.

At some point the government is going to have to consider the case for electronic voting. After all, when it comes to just about every other facet of human existence the government is trying to force us online with its ‘digital first’ strategy. Just try applying for benefits or paying your taxes via the post. Yet when it comes to voting, the state seems to drop all the guff about digital being the future and insists that we do everything via the Royal Mail.

Could delays in postal ballots change the result of the election? That is unlikely given the vast gulf in the polls. Yet there is some evidence that the Conservatives will suffer more if postal ballots are not delivered on time. A study published in the journal Parliamentary Affairs using data from the British election study 2019 found that the likelihood of someone voting by post rises steadily with age. Labour and Liberal Democrat voters were less likely to vote by post – which is unsurprising, given their age profile. What the study didn’t find, on the other hand, is significant variation in rates of postal voting between high density urban areas and low density rural areas – in spite of polling stations being closer at hand in the former.

A delay in postal votes, in other words, looks like it would hit the Conservatives the hardest – but not remotely by enough to make a difference to the outcome.