Tag Archives: electoral commission

Should Police Commissioner candidates get election addresses?

By Mark Pack | Published 21st January 2012 - 2:25 pm

The Electoral Commission’s Peter Wardle last week gave a speech to local government Chief Executives, during which he made this point about election addresses:

The constituencies in the PCC [Police and Crime Commissioner] elections are big, with over a million voters in some cases. There’s currently no provision for candidates to have Freepost facilities to deliver their election addresses to voters. Nor is there a provision for any sort of booklet for voters that would include candidates’ election addresses. Alongside the PCC elections, of course, there may well be elections for Mayors in the larger English cities. And candidates for Mayor will, on current plans, be

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Posted in Election law | Also tagged elected police commissioners, peter wardle | 3 Comments

LibLink: Chris Rennard – Integrity in ensuring that people can vote

By Nick Thornsby | Published 19th January 2012 - 6:28 pm

Over on epolitix, Lord (Chris) Rennard has a piece calling for changes to the electoral registration system to place the burden on individuals rather than households following the news that at least 6 million people are unregistered:

All parties and the Electoral Commission are agreed in principle that the electoral registration system should change to put the responsibility on individuals rather than households.

But the Commission report shows that our existing system is not as good as we thought and there are clearly dangers in making any changes. The biggest dangers to the integrity of the process would be to suggest that

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Posted in LibLink | Also tagged chris rennard, electoral registration | 3 Comments

Michael Brown arrested in Dominican Republic

By Mark Pack | Published 7th January 2012 - 5:25 pm

The Guardian reports:

The Liberal Democrats’ biggest donor, who has been on the run for three years after being convicted of a multimillion pound theft, has been arrested by police in the Dominican Republic, the Guardian can disclose…

A City of London police spokesman confirmed Brown’s arrest. “We are pleased to hear that Michael Brown has been detained by authorities in the Dominican Republic, and are currently establishing contact with them to find out further details about his arrest.

Posted in News | Also tagged donations (Lib Dem), michael brown | 23 Comments

Electoral registration: the group that gets overlooked

By Mark Pack | Published 15th December 2011 - 3:55 pm

People who live in private rented accommodation rarely catch the attention of politicians or political journalists. It’s odd, because so many people working for MPs or media outlets, particularly in London, spend a good number of years in shared private rented accommodation and normally the problem is that politicians place too much attention on people they are immediately familiar with rather than too little.

The neglect of the private renter is seen most often when the housing market is discussed, where it is frequently not only taken as a given that home ownership is what it is all about but also …

Posted in Election law | Also tagged electoral registration | 6 Comments

When should election counts be held?

By Mark Pack | Published 4th December 2011 - 9:54 am

The Electoral Commission has a new consultation paper out, returning to an old issue: when should election counts be held?

As the paper says:

The key issue is that many Returning Officers have considered that increasingly complex election counts would be better conducted the morning after the close of poll when staff are fresh and less likely to make mistakes, while governments, political parties and candidates have often pressed for counts in major elections to take place immediately after the close of polls. This has led to controversies in the public domain ahead of major elections.

Posted in Election law | 7 Comments

Electoral Commission calls for local Council Tax referendums to be postponed

By Mark Pack | Published 2nd November 2011 - 7:47 am

The Electoral Commission has called on Parliament to modify the Localism Bill to delay the proposed start date for local referendums on Council Tax levels, neighbourhood development plans and local authority structures (e.g. elected Mayors) from Spring 2012 to Spring 2013.

It’s forthright message, headlined (in capital letters no less): “IMPORTANT RECOMMENDATION TO PARLIAMENT” is that with the legislation not yet passed by Parliament, there will simply not be enough time between it being passed and the proposed first possible local referendum date for the contests to be properly run. Instead, it says implementation should be delayed by a year in …

Posted in Election law | Also tagged localism bill | 3 Comments

How were the Scottish elections run?

By Mark Pack | Published 28th October 2011 - 3:53 pm

The Electoral Commission’s report into May’s Scottish elections is now out and broadly paints a positive picture of how the elections were administered.

As is often the case in such reports, it is the apparently obvious recommendations that highlight how something, somewhere took a rather unfortunate turn. In the case of this report, one such recommendation is tucked way unobtrusively in the middle of p.8:

Following any boundary reviews ROs and EROs must make thorough checks with the relevant Boundary Commission to ensure they are able to precisely identify the exact boundaries that are set out in legislation.

Indeed.

(700 people in Glasgow were …

Posted in Election law | Also tagged postal voting | Leave a comment

Electoral administration lessons from the AV referendum: the Electoral Commission’s view

By Mark Pack | Published 25th October 2011 - 8:24 am

Last week, the Electoral Commission published its report into the administration of the May’s AV referendum. Despite the high political temperatures during the campaign, the administration got little criticism at the time and so the report rightly reflects that. However, amongst the details are some important pointers to issues that are likely to come up at future elections.

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Posted in Election law, News | Also tagged av referendum, postal voting | 3 Comments

Mark Williams MP writes: We can achieve an accurate and complete electoral register

By Mark Williams MP | Published 21st October 2011 - 12:53 pm

The Government’s planned introduction of Individual Voter Registration was to be the subject of a special ‘opposition day’ debate in the House of Commons this week. Labour MPs are getting extremely excitable about the changes, shrouding what are really partisan fears in a cloak of concern about democracy. In the event, their debate was cancelled because of other urgent business, but the issue certainly isn’t going away.

For all of their recent hollering, legislation to introduce Individual Electoral Registration was actually passed by Labour in 2009. They accepted then that the present system of household registration is inadequate and inaccurate. It …

Posted in Election law, Op-eds | Also tagged electoral registration, nick clegg | 2 Comments

What’s the point of switching to individual electoral registration?

By Mark Pack | Published 9th October 2011 - 5:50 pm

As some background to the current debates, I thought it useful to revive and update an old post of my on the subject as there has been relatively little coverage of the reasons why it has been supported by all parties (including Labour, who even talked up their achievement in introducing the first legislation for individual electoral registration before 2010, in their last general election manifesto).

The current electoral registration system is based on one registration form being delivered to each household, with the head of the household completing the form on behalf of everyone there and sending it back (“household …

Posted in Election law | Also tagged electoral registration | 9 Comments

Individual electoral registration: consultation response

By Mark Pack | Published 5th October 2011 - 7:50 am

Here’s the response I’ve sent to the Electoral Registration Transformation Programme () in response to the consultation on the draft legislation for individual electoral registration, which closes on 14 October. For the background on the benefits of individual electoral registration, see What’s the point of switching to individual electoral registration?

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the draft legislation which has been published to implement individual electoral registration in Great Britain. The publication of a full draft for public consultation is a very welcome improvement on the way …

Posted in Election law | Also tagged electoral registration, jury service, michael wills | 16 Comments

Performance standards for Returning Officers consultation opens

By Mark Pack | Published 14th September 2011 - 10:25 am

The Electoral Commission is currently consulting on its performance standards for Returning Officers in Great Britain. Here’s my response (with the full consultation document embedded below).

Dear Ross Clayton,

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the draft Returning Officer performance standards.

As you rightly identify (p.6), one of the key principles for each election should be participation: “it should be straightforward for people to participate in our elections, whether campaigning or voting”.

However, the campaigning aspect of this is only partially followed up in the standards themselves. Performance Standard 2c covers some aspects of this, and the inclusion of informal nomination …

Posted in Election law | Also tagged ross clayton, turnout | 1 Comment

Michael Brown and the Lib Dems: the bits the Telegraph missed out

By Stephen Tall | Published 11th September 2011 - 5:57 pm

Today’s Telegraph splashes with the story, Revealed: secret new life of fugitive Lib Dem donor, devoting its first three pages to the tale of Michael Brown’s new life on the run in a Caribbean hideout.

Michael Brown, as our readers will not need reminding, donated £2.4m to the party just before the 2005 general election. His subsequent arrest and conviction on several counts of fraud have been an embarrassment to the Lib Dems ever since.

The Telegraph’s story is, shock horror, a little partial, though. Take this paragraph: ‘The Liberal Democrats have steadfastly resisted all attempts to force them to repay …

Posted in News | Also tagged donations (Lib Dem), michael brown, parliamentary ombudsman, telegraph | 39 Comments

Chris Huhne cleared over election expense claims

By The Voice | Published 28th July 2011 - 8:44 pm

As Mark Pack reported over on his blog, for the second time allegations over Chris Huhne’s election expenses that were strongly backed by Paul Staines and Harry Cole have collapsed after the Electoral Commission investigated them:

The review concluded that one item had been under-reported by £10.15 (sic) but that otherwise the expenditure in the short and long campaign had been properly recorded and declared.

Regularly readers may recall how stridently both of them attacked people who disagreed with their claims over Huhne’s election expenses (such as in this thread, which includes Paul Staines daring anyone to bet that Chris …

Posted in News | Also tagged harry cole, mark pack, paul staines | 8 Comments

Opinion: Why Wrexham Labour Party should be ashamed: The curious case of Aled Roberts

By David Hennigan | Published 7th July 2011 - 12:21 pm

It’s estimated that well over 30% of the Welsh population speak Welsh as their first language – that is growing year on year. Hundreds of thousands more across the world speak it – even in a distant corner of Argentina – the valleys of a Patagonia. My partner from Rhosllanerchrugog and her family speak Welsh. They are fiercely proud of their heritage and would be absolutely disgusted with the treatment of Aled Roberts AM. It appears that they don’t speak Welsh at the Electoral Commission!

Now let me declare an interest, I don’t know Aled Roberts, I know his mum …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged aled roberts, john dixon, labour party, Wales, wrexham | 21 Comments

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