Some scenes from a trip to Birmingham, England’s second largest city, 120 miles from London but only 75 minutes from Euston Station by train. I had been here once before, in 2001, and was struck by the vitality of the city’s downtown, a stark contrast with my old home town of Detroit. It contains many grand beaux arts buildings from the nineteenth century as well as many sparkling new buildings, including a giant convention center where the city’s votes will be counted Thursday night and Friday morning. The great historical figure in Birmingham politics was Joseph Chamberlain, a screw manufacturer and longtime mayor, a leader of the Liberal party in the 1870s and 1880s who split with Prime Minister William Gladstone over Irish home rule (Chamberlain was against) and who as Colonial Minister in a Conservative government played a critical role in the Boer War of 1899-1902. Chamberlain was the father of Austen Chamberlain, the only Conservative party leader between 1902 and 1997 who was not prime minister, and Neville Chamberlain, who was prime minister in 1937-40.

The Ladywood Arts and Leisure Centre. It’s a circa 1960s building, with a faded mural of children playing in a park, with a large gymnasium-auditorium room similar to those in American schools of the same period. Here, on 40 tables, each labeled with the name of an electoral ward, postal votes are being tabulated. Local volunteers are checking the signatures and dates of birth with those on the electoral register, and putting them in appropriate containers to be counted on election night; surprisingly, there’s no authentication required on the registration application. The Daily Mail has a front-page story on postal vote fraud, and as Daniel Hannan writes in his Telegraph blog in 2005 a judge ruled there was “massive, systematic and organized fraud” in Birmingham. As a result, the Labour party in Birmingham is not relying on postal votes this year, but the Liberal Democrats are. Some of the 40 tables are quiet; the votes have all been counted. Around the Bordesely Green electoral ward table hover multiple party observers, mostly of South Asian descent; this is a heavily Pakistani area, where the Liberal Democrats have promoted postal voting in an attempt to unseat a Labour MP. Am I watching fraudulent votes being processed? Quite possibly, although the presence of observers from multiple parties suggests that some of it is being detected.