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.
Lib Dem Voice can reveal that the rare Election Petition Court which was held in Uppermill for the constituency of Oldham East and Saddleworth earlier in September will be delayed in giving its verdict.
Mr Justice Nigel Teale, one of the two High Court judges hearing the case, originally indicated that they would give their verdict sometime in mid-October.
Helen Mountfield QC asked whether there was a likelihood of a verdict at the end of the week of giving evidence, but Mr Justice Teale made plain in the politest and firmest way that neither he nor Mr Justice Griffith Williams, the other …
By Helen Duffett
| Thu 30th September 2010 - 11:46 am
The question for the proposed referendum on the UK Parliamentary voting system should be made shorter and easier to understand, according to an assessment published by the Electoral Commission.
As I blogged back in July when when the original question was proposed,
The Electoral Commission is statutorily required to consider the intelligibility of the question, before reporting back to Parliament, who will consider the comments and have the final say after Recess.
Today’s report examines the question:
Do you want the United Kingdom to adopt the ‘alternative vote’ system instead of the current ‘first past the post’ system for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons?
The Commission undertook research to find out whether people could easily understand the question, and concluded:
Former Conservative MP Angela Browning, former Liberal Democrat MP David Howarth, former SNP MP and MSP George Reid and ex-Labour HQ staffer Roy Kennedy have been appointed as Electoral Commissioners by Parliament (see news release here).
These are the first ‘political’ appointments since the laws governing the Electoral Commission were changed to permit people with recent political activity to become commissioners.
Roy Kennedy’s appointment may cause some comment as he was the Labour Party’s Director of Compliance since 2005, a period during which there were many controversies over the Labour Party’s approach to finances. For example, there were no prosecutions over …
The local Labour party in Bury has suspended one of their councillors, Tamoor Tariq, and Manchester police are investigating following the discovery of a series of confidential electoral documents dumped in Brandlesholme.
Election canvas sheets containing hundreds of names and addresses of Redvales residents and details of how they intended to vote at the last election — postal General Election ballot papers — a confidential letter from the Governors of the Derby High School — documents and letters addressed to Cllr Tariq at his home in Gigg Lane, Bury — unopened letters addressed to
Helen Mountfield QC today led the special election petition court through the substance of the arguments, case law and disputed facts of the case. Representation of the People Act 1983 section 106 was a specific time limited right of prosecution in relations to the conduct of a particular election. Both Helen Mountfield and Gavin Millar used many of the same pieces of case law and legislation. Amongst these was the Human Rights Act which …
In a statement to Parliament yesterday, Mark Harper (Minister for Constitutional Reform) announced that the Government will speed up the introduction of individual electoral registration by axing Labour’s plans for an interim phase of voluntary individual registration. Instead, individual electoral registration will be introduced in 2014.
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
By Kevin Peters
| Wed 15th September 2010 - 8:54 pm
This report is from the Lib Dem Voice court reporter. You may also like to read Nick Thornsby’s blog for more trial news
Mr Woolas took the witness box for a third day in a row to answer questions in rebuttal from his own counsel. He insisted that photograph of a demonstrators often referred to in Labour emails as the mad Muslims had nothing to the article beneath which referred to Liberal Democrat candidate Elwyn Watkins pandering to extremists in the Labour leaflet called the Examiner.
Next to be called to the stand was Miss Rebbecca McGladdery, who was a …
Helen Mountfield is the lead counsel for Elwyn Watkins with James Laddie QC her able second from Matrix chambers.
Elwyn was in the witness box first. Mountfield’s opening statement was devastating in that it refered to email from Woolas’ campaign team which wrote “we have to make the white folk angry” or as they put it ‘angrey’.
It would seem that all trials now have to refer to the European Human Rights …
Monday sees the start of a court case against Labour MP Phil Woolas alleging false statements were made about his Liberal Democrat opponent, Elwyn Watkins, during the general election earlier this year.
The case will involve a court judging on how far it is acceptable to go in very robust election literature and involves the rarely used provision in Section 106 of the 1983 Representation of the People Act which covers false statements about candidates:
(1) A person who, or any director of any body or association corporate which—
(a) before or during an election,
(b) for the purpose of affecting the return of
A quick update about Walsall Conservative councillor Mohammed Munir, whose suspension from the party after postal vote fraud allegations were made we previously covered. His case has now gone to court and he was found innocent.
I read your speech from Thursday to the Committee on Standards in Public Life with interest. It is good to see the progress being made in many areas of political reform, including the commitment made in the speech that, “in the New Year we will produce draft legislation to complete the modernization of the House of Lords”.
Much else too in the speech was good to read, but I think you are missing an important issue about how the changes to election expense rules introduced for the 2010 general election are driving political parties in the wrong direction.
By Helen Duffett
| Wed 8th September 2010 - 12:48 pm
A specially-constituted election court has announced that the Liberal Democrats have won a recount of the May 6 election result in High Street Ward, London Borough of Waltham Forest.
The recount took place in private on July 30 before a judge at the High Court after a member of the public spotted a potential error at the original count on May 6. It was thought that 1,000 votes may have been mistakenly added to each of the Labour candidates’ tallies.
There is a chance to introduce an imaginative new way of opening up the political process and public sector data to the public in the legislation currently going through Parliament to change the rules for Parliamentary boundary reviews.
As under the old rules, submitting proposals to the Boundary Commission, or commenting on their own proposals, will require access to electoral register and geographic data except for the most minor of comments (or debates over constituency names, which can generate deep passions). The better access you have to such information and the more sophisticated the computer tools you posses to manipulate it, …
More problems with the general election administration have come to light in Wolverhampton South West, with the news that one of the marked registers has gone missing. An investigation is already taking place into a mismatch between the number of ballot papers counted and the number issued, with more having been recorded as counted than were officially issued.
According to the official election results, Wolverhampton South West saw more votes cast than there had been ballot papers issued.
At the count there were 40,160 votes totalled up in the general election in May. However, the official records show that only 40,094 ballot papers should have been in the count, 66 less than the number of votes counted. This is not a simple matter of a typo in the official records, because Wolverhampton Council has confirmed that these two figures are the ones official …
David Mundell MP (Conservative) is taking to the courts to apply for official relief for breaking his election expense limit during the general election.
The relief process is designed to allow people who make innocent and inconsequential mistakes to admit to their mistake and avoid prosecution. A typical example is if a candidate by mistake leaves a small bill off their expenses return. However, David Mundell’s case is slightly more complicated as although he too left a bill out of his short campaign expense return, adding it in takes him over the limit.
A quick update on our previous coverage of the court case over more than £350,000 of impermissible donations accepted by UKIP. Last month the Supreme Court ruled in UKIP’s favour, reducing the amount UKIP has to repay to just under £15,000.
Although on a strict narrow literal reading of the legislation wording all impermissible donations have to be forfeit, by a 4-3 ruling the Supreme Court decided that the word “forfeit” is used in an unusual way in the wording of the legislation and that the wider context shows that the total of impermissible donations is the maximum that …
Confidence in the administration of elections by Bristol Council was badly shaken this May after a series of problems, including ballot papers found in the wrong place, election results taking 6 hours longer than expected to be declared and numerous phone calls going unanswered. A detailed review of electoral administration was subsequently ordered and it has called for major changes.
Apart from more than half of the election phone queries going unanswered, the office for the council’s electoral services department in the Corn Exchange has been described as “woefully inadequate”. One of Ms Dixon’s many recommendations
The recount took place in private last Friday before a judge at the High Court after a member of the public spotted a potential error at the original count on May 6. It was thought that 1,000 votes may have been mistakenly added to each of the Labour candidates’ tallies.
If this was the case, it would have led to Labour’s Steve Terry being elected instead of Liberal Democrat Mahmood Hussain.
The Londonist reports that Joan Ruddock, the Labour MP for Lewisham Deptford, has taken the unusual step of submitting her election expenses return without attaching any invoices or receipts, instead listing all expenses as “notional”:
The wording of the question that voters will be asked in next May’s AV referendum has been published:
Do you want the United Kingdom to adopt the ‘alternative vote’ system instead of the current ‘first past the post’ system for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons?
The wording of the question is contained in the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, published last week. (The question will also be made available in Welsh.) The Electoral Commission is statutorily required to consider the intelligibility of the question, before reporting back to Parliament, who will consider the comments and have …
The Association of Electoral Administrators (AEA) has published a report, Beyond 2010: the future of electoral administration in the UK, reviewing the workings of the electoral system in this year’s May elections and calling for major changes to be introduced.
The report repeats previous calls for the laws governing elections to be made simpler and codified into one act, rather than as at present scattered across numerous different acts. The AEA is also calling for a review of the way that the running of elections is funded and structured.
More controversially, the AEA also calls for a new system for enforcing election laws with the introduction of,
a clearer and local system of accountability and challenge through the introduction in election law of a formal complaints system. This should establish a court of first resort to deal with complaints arising from the conduct of elections.
A low level complaints system may help filter off some issues, such as partially missing imprints on leaflets which nonetheless are clearly from a particular party or candidate, which take up police time to little end. However, given the existing overlapping roles for Returning Officers, the Electoral Commission, the police, the CPS, Parliamentary authorities and even local government standards systems (who have dealt with complaints over leaflets), adding in a new formal complaints system could increase rather than reduce complexity and result in more time being consumed as an issue is raised repeatedly via different routes.
Electoral administrators are also calling for a lengthening of the timetable for general elections and Parliamentary by-elections. Although motivated by giving more time for administrative tasks to be completed during the campaign, such longer timescales would also tackle the long-term decline in the length of Parliamentary by-election campaigning with the resulting decrease in the time in which voters can find out about candidates and policies. (On this last point see my research Parliamentary by-elections get four weeks shorter – and why it matters.)
The review also includes a very sensible suggestion that where postal votes end up being rejected because of a human error by a valid would-be voter (e.g. they transposed date and month of birth by mistake on their original application), then Returning Officers should have more power to contact the person to tell them something has gone wrong and give them a chance to rectify the problem before any future election which is also covered by that faulty postal vote application.
The Association of Electoral Administrators is calling for election writs to be modernised and electronic delivery and return to be possible, along with electronic filing of election expense returns.
Here is the full report along with all the recommendations:
Channel 4’s investigation with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism into MPs’ election expenses has raised questions about another five MPs in addition to Zac Goldsmith.
Having already looked at some of the legal questions around Zac Goldsmith, how do the other five stack up? Two raise important points of how the law should be interpreted, one has unclear evidence so far and two appear to involve administrative errors without any actual overspending.
A written answer this week confirmed that Britain’s quota of MEPs is about to increase by one:
European Parliament Elections
Priti Patel: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs pursuant to the written ministerial statement of 6 July 2010, Official Report, columns 6-7WS, on the European Parliament Transitionary Protocol, whether the Electoral Commission was consulted on the arrangements for electing a new UK MEP before the intergovernmental conference on 23 June 2010; and if he will make a statement.
Mr Lidington: The transitionary Protocol concerning the composition of the European Parliament is a technical change to the Treaty relating …
Having reviewed a complaint made about Zac Goldsmith’s election expenses (the ones that didn’t feature in that TV spat), the Electoral Commission has decided there’s a strong enough case to warrant investigation by them:
The assessment of the information indicated that there was the possibility of a failure to comply with the Representation of the People Act 1983 (RPA) and that further enquiries should be made in order to establish the facts of the matter.
The Electoral Commission could then decide to refer the matter to the police for them to investigate and, potentially, for legal action to be taken. This …
A High Court judge has ruled that an election court should sit in the Oldham East and Saddleworth constituency on 13 September, to decide whether Phil Woolas can continue as an MP.
As we reported last month, Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Candidate Elwyn Watkins is challenging the result of the election in Oldham, alleging a breach of the Representation of the People Act (1983). Mr Watkins claims that literature distributed by the Labour party “contained numerous misleading and erroneous claims” regarding his personal character and reputation, and that of his campaign.
The allegations made against Zac Goldsmith highlight three areas of electoral law where the law leaves considerable latitude for interpretation and where the usual clarity that comes from an accumulation of case law is missing because of the paucity of cases that have considered the issues.
The first area is the question of reusable materials. If, for example, a local party buys some clipboards they may end up getting used over several elections and also outside of elections for activities such as street stalls. What therefore should the cost be to an individual campaign of using the clipboards? Calculations involving …
The decision to schedule the planned referendum on AV for the same day next Spring as other elections are due has two primary arguments in its favour: turnout and cost.
The record of combining elections is that it increases turnout for the election type which traditionally has the lower turnout without depressing turnout for the other. Similarly, combining elections reduces costs as, for example, polling stations only have to be open for one day rather than two separate days.
The turnout factor is hard to estimate for a referendum/public elections combination but working out the likely costs is much easier and in …
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...
At the count there were 40,160 votes totalled up in the general election in May. However, the 
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