An election looms, but can we trust the process?

With little fanfare, it was confirmed yesterday that Rishi Sunak won’t call a general election for May 2nd. 

The start of Easter Recess means that we still don’t know when this desperate, unelected Prime Minister will finally stop clinging to power and have the courage to face the country and call a general election.

In the face of an ongoing cost of living nightmare, child poverty at record levels and public services crumbling around our ears, it’s not surprising the Tories are afraid to go to the polls even if 40% of people told a recent survey they wanted to cast their vote in May. 

We need an election sooner rather than later, that much is obvious, but the whole country should be concerned about how ill-prepared we are for one. 

Because regardless of when it eventually happens, there’s a serious risk that our democratic processes could be attacked and undermined like never before.

This week, the Government revealed that ‘state-affiliated actors’ with links to China have targeted individual MPs and gained access to the Electoral Commission’s systems – which manages the data of 40million voters – in two malicious cyber-attacks.

But beyond a slap on the wrist and sanctions for two low level Chinese officials, there is little to reassure us that the Tories are taking any serious action to prevent these advanced persistent threats to our democracy from succeeding again come election time.

We have already seen ministers’ shameful complacency in the face of the Russian threat. 

After months in which senior figures denied any evidence of successful interference in our democratic processes, when the Tories jeered and shouted me down in Parliament for even raising the question, the Government later admitted it was almost certain Russian actors sought to interfere in the 2019 election.

When the Russia report was finally released, it made for shocking reading, with the authors saying the government had ‘actively avoided’ ever even looking into whether there had been interference in major democratic moments in the UK, from the Scottish vote on independence to the Brexit referendum of 2016.   

There has still yet to be any kind of serious investigation that you would expect a hostile state attack on our democracy to warrant. 

But closer to home, there are other threats to the integrity of this election too, which the Tories are at best turning a blind eye to, and at worst making even more problematic.

The danger of disinformation has already been shown to be serious as we have seen from recent examples of AI-generated deep fakes of UK politicians, including Sadiq Khan and Keir Starmer, spreading like wildfire on social media.

Rather than standing up to it and forcing social media to do more to tackle misinformation, the Conservatives have this week been guilty of feeding that atmosphere of distrust themselves in a fearmongering campaign video, which used images of New York to portray London as a dangerous and out of control crime hotspot.  

Voter disenfranchisement is another serious issue coming down the line – a problem, in my view, entirely of the government’s own making. 

Their decision to introduce strict new rules compelling voters to show specific forms of ID to cast their vote could see as many as 8million people in this country disenfranchised at the next election, according to a cross-party report from a Commons committee earlier this month, which identified major defects in our creaking voter registration system that will hit young people, renters, ethnic minorities and poorer voters most.

And the final disaster waiting to happen is the late delivery of postal votes in the light of the serious problems and delays in Royal Mail deliveries up and down the country. 

As the MP in Brighton Pavilion, where such issues are acute, I have been sounding the alarm on this ever since the local elections last year. 

In Brighton and Hove constituencies, the Royal Mail failed to deliver a staggering 1423 postal votes in time to be counted, despite them being posted before the deadline.

To put that number in context, at the General Election in 2019, just 17 postal votes were delivered too late. 

The recent figures should be cause of considerable concern, but there’s no apparent sign that Royal Mail has improved or taken any steps to ensure the same postcode lottery doesn’t happen again when voters next go to the polls.

Whether it’s disinformation, disenfranchisement, delivery or direct attacks on our democracy from hostile actors, the risks to our next general election may be greater than we have ever seen before, yet our reckless Government continues to bury its head in the sand. 

These dangerous attacks on our democracy can no longer be tolerated.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk. 

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