The Election Law Channel is dedicated to coverage of UK election law, giving unrivalled detailed news of election law matters, explaining complex matters in plain English and setting out the practical relevance of technical legal provisions.
David Davis and Jack Straw have got their way. The Commons will get the chance to vote – probably in the middle of February – for a motion to defy the European Court of Human Rights on prisoner voting…
The prime minister welcomes the plan for the Commons to hold a debate on whether prisoners should be given the vote as demanded by the European Court of Human Rights and believes that it “could be helpful”, I’m told. David Cameron is said to want as few prisoners as possible to be given the vote and is still
During 2011, the political reform agenda is likely to be dominated by a spring referendum on the alternative vote and by the government fleshing out its promise to bring in elections by proportional representation for an elected Upper House. Significant though the impact of both the alternative vote and Upper House elections may be, there are two much smaller ideas the government should look to pilot during the year because a healthy democracy also requires healthy turnouts; 2011 should see weekend voting and increasing the number of polling stations tested out.
It’s always tempting to view the verdict of investigations through a partisan filter – if ‘your side’ does not get punished, it’s a great result by a wise team of investigators; if on the other hand it does get punished, it’s a muddle-headed verdict from dangerously ignorant investigators, whether that means the police, the courts or a regulator.
However, the case of Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith’s election expenses raises important issues which deserve a more careful consideration that the immediate partisan filter. Some are longer-term ones about how regulation of election expenditure is changing as the methods people use alter; others …
It’s a well established pattern that candidates with names higher up the alphabet do slightly better in multi-member ward elections in the UK than those with names further down the alphabet. Other factors (including the perceived ethnicity and gender of a name, along with other information such as the party label) usually have a larger effect, but there is something of an alphabetic effect all the same.
New research has shown this to be the case in the first STV local council elections held in Scotland, leading to calls for change.
Yesterday the Electoral Commission decided not to refer Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith’s election expenses to the police for further investigation. Though this brings to an end official inquiries into whether Zac Goldsmith had kept within election law, the details of the Electoral Commission’s rulings leave several questions about Goldsmith’s expenses unanswered and also suggest that in future spending under the limit during the long campaign may be seen as a defence for breaking the short campaign limit.
Michael Crick has the scoop about the ending of plans to fund open primaries:
A very senior Cabinet minister has told me that the Coalition has now scrapped its radical plans to pay for primary elections to choose party candidates in 200 safe seats.
The full Coalition Agreement last May said: “We will fund 200 all-postal primaries over this Parliament, targetted at seats which have not changed hands for many years.”
The money would have been allocated to parties which now have seats in Parliament, according to their shares of the vote in May 2010.
Primaries have been very controversial, so the need …
Earlier today the Government laid out in detail how it plans to abide by a court ruling against the current ban on prisoners voting in elections.
The plans, due to be put to the vote in Parliament next year, separate prisoners into two categories – those sentenced to four years or longer (who will be banned from registering to vote) and those on shorter sentences, who will normally be entitled to register to vote but on sentencing a judge will have discretion to remove their right to vote also.
Not only did you add in a provision that the legal obligation to vote in Australian elections does not apply to people who are not qualified to vote, you also added in a provision that being dead is a legally acceptable reason not to vote.
A triumph of legal generosity.
And now, excuse me whilst I go and read Part XVII, “Special Provisions Relating To The Polling In Antarctica”. (I want to find out how to become an Assistant Antarctic …
A significant increase in the pay of some Returning Officers was quietly introduced by the then Labour government ahead of this year’s general election but no estimate was made as to what the costs would be of rule changes that made the pay more generous.
In March, the Ministry of Justice issued its Returning Officers’ Expenses Guidance Notes Parliamentary Elections (Great Britain) which included, in Section 7.7, an increase in the payments made to Returning Officers for supervising more than one constituency. Previously the payments (worked out on a sum per entry on the electoral register) were tapered if a Returning Officer covered …
My original headline was going to be “One-third of (Acting) Returning Officers assess their own performance wrongly”, but the more closely I look at the latest Returning Officer performance data from the Electoral Commission, the worse it looks.
A sample survey by the Electoral Commission of the performance self-assessment exercise by (Acting) Returning Officers found that 33 out of 100 had assessed their own performance wrongly. The findings, detailed in the Commission’s report on the latest performance standards (p.6-7), call into question how useful the assessment system really is.
But even worse than this headline figure, in Wolverhampton the Returning Officer …
Yesterday the House of Lords passed an amendment by four votes changing the legislation for a referendum on AV so that rather than the referendum having to be 5 May 2011 it would have to be held at some point before 31 October 2011.
The amendment does not require a date other than 5 May to be used, but it is likely to be overturned in the Commons – especially as the Electoral Commission has expressed its worries over the implications of the amendment. Today it issued a statement, “setting out its concerns about the implications of the amendment”. These are …
Although the BBC got rather excitable in its coverage of Friday’s legal defeat for ex-Labour MP Phil Woolas, talking about how the ruling was set to have a major impact on how elections are run in the UK, the reality is rather more prosaic. The law which Woolas broke isn’t new and nor has the case thrown up significant precedent or previously overlooked aspects to it.
There probably will be some candidates and agents whose eyes have previously skipped over the part of the guidance from their local returning officer, the Electoral Commission or their political party which makes reference to this law and who next time round will pay a little more attention to what the guidance says. But there will not be any rapid major rewriting of any of those sources of information – as warnings about this part of the law have regularly featured in all of them.
That said, there are some legal points which the Woolas case has addressed and on which the High Court’s ruling gives clarity.
The most important is on whether or not the High Court can judicially review a determination made on a point of law by an election court for a Parliamentary election. Points of fact are settled by the election court, but in other cases where the facts are settled in one court, points of law can still be challenged in another court.
The High Court decided that it does have the power to do this, even though – as the ruling points out – there is already a process to refer points of law from the election court to the High Court (see paragraphs 59-62 of the ruling). This extension of the ability to query points of law with a body other than the election court itself is a welcome one as it provides a strengthened safeguard against the law being wrongly applied.
The other point on which this case may well be cited in future is its refinement of the law’s wording on what is banned. As the ruling says, “There is in our judgement a very significant difference between a statement that goes to the political conduct of a candidate and one that goes beyond it and says something personal about his personal character … Freedom of political debate must allow for the fact that statements are made which attack the political character of a candidate”.
If anything, the ruling widens the grounds for defence under this law rather than narrowing them.
Details of how the Electoral Commission proposes to administer next May’s referendum on the voting system (provided it passes Parliament) have emerged in a series of circulars issued by the Commission last week.
Some of the details are likely to gain widespread welcome, including the extra anti-fraud step of requiring that 100% of postal votes are given extra security checks against original records (the law only requires a minimum of 20% and although many elections see 100% checking, not …
The publication this week of the Police Reform And Social Responsibility Bill provided, amongst other matters, details of how the planned elections for Police Commissioners (or, strictly speaking, Police and Crime Commissioners) would be conducted.
The overall plan is to treat them like local elections, with the same electorate and the same polling day in May. However, the Bill also applies the ‘standard’ election system for existing directly elected executive posts to Police Commissioners, namely the supplementary vote.
This is likely to be controversial, both because the supplementary vote is very unpopular with many Liberal Democrats and also because the …
A quick update on the case of electoral fraud in Walsall, where father and son were charged. The father, Conservative councillor Mohammed Munir was cleared in September. His son, also a Conservative Party member but not a councillor, has now however been convicted.
Ali Hayder Munir has received a three month jail sentence after admitting to two charges of faking proxy vote applications in the run up to the 2008 elections for Walsall Council. The fake applications involved identifying real but unregistered people and then making electoral registration and proxy vote applications on their behalf. The government’s plans …
Yesterday the Electoral Commission published information about the campaign spending by UK political parties during the 2010 general election. Buried near the end of the release was this news:
Two third parties – ‘UNISON – The Public Service Union’ and ‘Searchlight Information Services Ltd’ – failed to submit their spending return on time. The Commission has issued Searchlight Information Services with a fine. The Commission will issue UNISON – The Public Service Union with a fine when they submit their return.
The overall figures showed spending down from its heights of 2005, with 43 parties spending just under £32m for 2010 …
Andrew Reeves is reporting that the police have decided not to take any further action after investigating Conservative MP David Mundell’s election expenses. As we reported previously:
His expense return showed him within the limit but wrongly classified one bill. A correct return would have shown him over the limit.
Although the police have decided that this mistake is not worthy of further action, the publicity, embarrassment and investigation are a strong reminder of the importance of candidates and agents properly checking legal paperwork before submitting it.
It is nothing new for a government to be talking about improving electoral registration by matching data between different sources. What is different about Nick Clegg’s latest comments on the subject, in a speech to the Hansard Society, is that the talk is now becoming much more specific, with pilot projects starting next year.
Local councils, for example, hold name and address information about people in several different databases. If they are able to make use of the data from other sources to highlight either gaps in the register, or suspicious entries that may be the result of fraud, this …
The investigations have not only failed to locate the missing electoral register but also found that part of the marked register also went missing in a second Parliamentary constituency, Wolverhampton North East.
Meanwhile, the investigation into the ballot paper number discrepancy …
A defeated candidate from the May 2010 general election is facing court action following claims he made false statements during the election. The Portsmouth News reports:
Les Cummings, who stood as the city’s Justice and Anti-Corruption Party will appear at Portsmouth Magistrates’ Court on Friday, charged with breaching the Representation of the People Act.
Police at Fareham Police Station charged Mr Cummings on Thursday afternoon, with having made, on April 22, before an election, for the purpose of affecting candidate Mike Hancock, false statements that he knew to be untrue.
Meanwhile in other election law news, Nick Clegg has rejected calls from …
Labour MP Michael Meacher is facing the threat of legal action after he took to his blog at the weekend to repeat some of the allegations made by now disgraced Labour MP Phil Woolas despite the court ruling that they were false.
Michael Meacher represents the neighbouring seat of Oldham West and Royton and claimed on his blog on Saturday that, “In the course of the one-week election court proceedings it appears that Watkins himself admitted that he had spent some £200,000 on the election, which is 7 times above the maximum permitted limit.”
Yet the court judgement (which appeared before Michael …
Clifford Chance (CC) is set to repeat the first round of its senior partner elections due to a glitch in the firm’s partnership deed.
The unexpected voting re-run has arisen because the magic circle firm’s partnership deed does not state that the contender receiving the least amount of votes in the first round is obliged to withdraw from the race.
All three partners in the running – London finance partner Malcolm Sweeting, German corporate finance partner Daniela Weber-Rey and City tax partner Jonathan Elman – were all asked to reconsider their position after last week’s stalemate, but none chose to
Phil Woolas has vowed to fight on to keep his parliamentary seat of Oldham East and Saddleworth, following the ruling on Friday that voids his General Election victory and bans him from standing as an MP for three years.
He no right of appeal against the judges’ decision, but wants to take it to judicial review, though on what grounds isn’t clear.
Mr Woolas would like us to think that the judgement is not only wrong but fundamentally damaging to political discourse – that it will allow politicians to get away with all sorts whilst their opponents cower, unwilling to risk …
Labour’s shadow immigration minister, Phil Woolas, was ejected from parliament today after a court ruled he had breached election laws by falsely claiming his Liberal Democrat opponent had “wooed” extremist Muslims in the run-up to the 6 May poll.
For the first time in 99 years a specially convened election court has overturned the result of a parliamentary poll and ordered a rerun after two high court judges ruled the result of the Oldham East poll void. They upheld the claim by Elwyn Watkins that Woolas knowingly made false statements.
In the light of today’s news that 3.5 million voters are missing from the electoral register, and in view of the forthcoming boundary changes based on the number of voters on the electoral roll as it stands next month, a timely email reminder today to Liberal Democrat members from Nick Clegg and Simon Hughes:
I’m sure you will agree that we as Liberal Democrats need to play our part in helping to ensure that everybody who should have the right to vote is in a position to exercise that right come next May.
The Scottish Parliament (Elections etc.) Order 2010 has been tabled in Parliament this week bringing about changes in the law for the Scottish Parliament elections. As it is a Statutory Instrument (SI) it cannot be amended – either it gets Parliamentary approval or it is rejected outright. It is extremely rare for an SI to be rejected and there are no signs that this one will be in that class.
The main changes people can therefore expect for the next Scottish Parliament elections are:
Back in July we reported how Britain was set to gain an extra Member of the European Parliament following the Lisbon Treaty. The Electoral Commission has now crunched the numbers using the same rules as previously to allocate MEPs to the different Euro-constituencies and it is West Midlands which comes out with an extra MEP.
Technically the government still has formally to accept the Electoral Commission’s recommendation, but in practice the Commission’s recommendation in this field is what will happen.
Labour’s “Twitter Tsar” and a qualified solicitor, has avoided a fine or a six month prison sentence for the offence. She deleted her original post after a few minutes, but not before it had been spread around the internet.
Amendments 265 and 266 to the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill may not have grabbed any headlines but they mark a very welcome change in policy – for under them the fees paid to referendum counting officers will only be paid in full if they meet an adequate standard of performance. Poor performance will now mean less pay.
At the general election, the returning officers in Sheffield and Hackney voluntarily decided to forgo their fees following the major organisational failures in the elections there. However, this was purely a voluntary act as there was no system for judging performance before …
David Allen A clear, credible, principled strategy from the Yorkists! Makes a welcome change.
Sadly, followed by twenty below-the-line posts, providing nearly twenty ve...
Simon McGrath so we get a permanant increase in costs for these subsidies based on ( alleged ) windfall profits. Its another big increase in spending -how is it to be paid ...
Peter Davies @Kira CollinsThat assumes we want to help people more with their energy bills than with all the other bills they may be struggling with. There is no reason why ...
Rob Heale Agree that we need to focus on strategy and have clearer messaging:-
1. We MUST prioritise membership recruitment in all we do, including PPB's, most leaflets...
Kira Collins Disappointed. The most obvious means of reducing energy bills is to remove VAT. Relatively straightforward to do and does not adversely impact on the attractive...
Not only did you add in a provision that the legal obligation to vote in Australian elections does not apply to people who are not qualified to vote, you also added in a provision that being dead is a legally acceptable reason not to vote.
Following the revelations that the 
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David Allen 
Simon McGrath 
Peter Davies 
Rob Heale 
Kira Collins 