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Khandro | 08:11 Wed 19th Jul 2017 | News
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You may not be able to read it all, but enough to get the idea.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/18/conservative-mps-fear-students-collected-friends-polling-cards/#comments

If this took place in marginal constituencies - which would have been the whole point of doing it - could it have made a big difference to the outcome of the election?
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And Labour is refusing to back an enquiry into this,I wonder why?
The short answer is ....no, it didn't.

Get used to it Khandro....Labour is making a come-back !

If there was another Election next week, Labour would probably win.
Sorry Mikey, but you, nor anybody else, cannot know what effect this had in marginal seats.
Yes, I accept that Danny, but I still don't think it made much difference.

Mrs May is in the invidious position she is, purely due to a bad decision that she made, together with a nasty and cackhanded campaign waged by her Generals.

But I would support any enquiry into this affair....the best disinfectant is sunlight.
There is growing evidence that students double-voted for Labour then bragged about it on Facebook. The Electoral Commission has launched an investigation into this after these unscrupulous types broke the law to boost Labour support at the election.

The watchdog said it has been contacted by 38 MPs expressing concern about reports of students bragging on social media about voting twice in their constituencies, and received more than 1,000 emails from members of the public who raised the issue.

Scumbags.
"Scumbags"....nice to see this debate taken to the higher ground !
I hope the matter is investigated properly, but I suspect that it was only one or two isolated incidents at most. I'm not aware of any reputable study that's ever shown voter fraud to be at any kind of level beyond a mere handful. In the 2010 election there were 232 total reports, of which well over half led to no further action; in 2015 the total number of reports was nearer to 500 but again most reports don't lead anywhere or are otherwise bogus. And incidentally those numbers probably include allegations made against candidates rather than just voters (see https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/find-information-by-subject/electoral-fraud/data-and-analysis for more )

I suspect this is the same level. No doubt there were a few stupid idiots who attempted to defraud the system but in the long run they are only a few and they shouldn't be used as an excuse to devalue the election result.

With that in mind, there were a few particularly close races this time round. North East Fife went to the SNP with a majority of just two votes, and there were eleven seats with winning majorities of less than 100. In those circumstances the result is highly sensitive to only minor changes, but if you flipped all those seats to the second party then the Tories would be only one seat better off. Unless you are determined to assert that the fraud was in only one direction, and so precisely targeted that you'd have to know the result before you rigged it, then I doubt that it would have been enough to affect the result materially. And a lot of the close seats this time round weren't even marginals to start off with.

No, I think the message is clear. Allegations of electoral fraud have to be taken seriously and I hope that anyone who did try such dirty tricks is brought to justice, but could it have made a big difference to the outcome? No.
Perhaps when an inquiry is done, it will be found that nothing really very naughty happened at all.....just like it did when the Tories "Battlebus" scandal in 2015 happened, despite CH4 uncovering eye-wateringly large amounts of evidence.
There is always electoral fraud in all big elections. The sheer number of people voting means that some will.

I have noticed that there seems to be two types of Labour voters more prevalent these days.

The 'ordinary folk' and the 'hard core folk'.

The ordinary ones don't believe anything particularly bad or damaging about their party (or at least acknowledge some bad bits but overall forgive) and the hard core that is quite insidious and sometimes quite open about what they do.

That can probably be said of any party but we have seen momentum appear to use some aggressive tactics and we are seeing a resurgence of targeting specific demographic groups into direct action.

I know it's not coming across in plain English but I'm tired and my brain is a fog so I may well have to clarify later.
Yes, "scumbags".
Cassa....what you have described is how politics has worked, more or less, for many years. All Parties target certain areas and certain demographic groups. I am sure that the Tories do the same with their own potential supporters.
I have never actually seen any examples of people "bragging on social media" about doing this. Nor can I find any examples through a few minutes' googling. "People bragging", furthermore, appears to be the main thing which leads people to think it happened. And yet there are so few evident actual examples of it online.

Perhaps someone on AB can furnish me with an example, but I strongly suspect that this is made up and is being used for short-term political gain. By the time the investigation finds out it was bunk, the claim will have served its purpose.
//I am sure that the Tories do the same with their own potential supporters.//

Yup. I know there was a thread on AB about this, but I have never heard of any Labour Party organisations doing anything like this:

https://www.channel4.com/news/revealed-inside-the-secretive-tory-election-call-centre
Kromo is probably correct....this stinks of the Tories panicking, in the face of adversity.

///"Scumbags" nice to see this debate taken to the higher ground!///

But it seems to be ok when you indulge in name-calling.
Danny

There is not a single example of someone actually bragging about this in your article, just claims that it is happening made by those bastions of neutrality who clearly have no stake in the political game at all, Andrea Leadsome and Nigel Farage.
Well the CON party would say this wouldn't they Mikey, they just can not get over their awful results in their desperate attempt to gain a huge majority in the last general election, and if they went for it again now ,they would stand a very good chance of being wiped out or not even being in opposition.
Baldric....where have I done that on this thread ?
Every other social media controversy I can think of - Carl Benjamin vs Jess Phillips, Diane Abbot's "divide and rule" comments, the abuse against MPs online, invariably comes with screenshots and examples. Every single one... except this story. This story is all allegations and no proof. And it is very, very, very easy to prove that someone is doing something on social media because it is semi (or in the case of Twitter completely) public.

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