amended section 2 of the Act of 1870 so that it applied only to those convicted of treason. Secondly, section 41(5) of the Representation of the People Act 1918 provided that “an inmate … in any prison, lunatic asylum, workhouse, poorhouse, or any other similar institution” was not to be treated as resident there. This had the unintended effect of excluding from registration not only convicted prisoners, but prisoners on remand, an anomaly which was not corrected until the Representation of the People Act 2000 allowed remand prisoners to be treated as residing in the place where they were in custody. Thirdly, even those prisoners who before 1969 were eligible to vote were generally unable in practice to do so because of the absence of the necessary administrative arrangements. Except in the case of servicemen, postal voting was not introduced until the Representation of the People Act 1948, and was not available generally until the Representation of the People Act 2000. 127. The modern law on this subject can be said to date from the Speaker’s Conference on Electoral Reform, which sat from 1965 to 1968 and issued its final report in February 1968 (Cmnd 3550). The conference was a non-partisan body drawn from all parties in the House of Commons and meeting under the chairmanship of the Speaker. It gave systematic consideration to all aspects of electoral law including the franchise and, apparently for the first time, the question of prisoners’ voting rights. Only its conclusions, not its reasons, were published, but the final report records that it considered evidence and documentation from many sources. It unanimously recommended that all convicted prisoners should be ineligible to vote. This recommendation was accepted, and effect was given to it by section 3 of the Representation of the People Act 1969. 128. The rationale of the exclusion of convicted prisoners from the franchise is as complex as the rationale for imprisonment itself. Section 142(1) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 provides: “Any court dealing with an offender in respect of his offence must have regard to the following purposes of sentencing— (a) the punishment of offenders, (b) the reduction of crime (including its reduction by deterrence), (c) the reform and rehabilitation of offenders, (d) the protection of the public, and Page 58