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.
When the Scotsman decided to write an article on election law – more specifically, the definitions and the constraints on what a political party and each candidate may do as set out in two much-amended pieces of legislation, the Representation of the Peoples Act 1983 and the Political Parties and Elections Act 2000 – they knew who to ask: LDV’s Co-Editor Mark Pack, the inspiration for LDV’s sister site the Election Law Channel. Here’s an excerpt, focusing on spending limits:
Mark Pack of Mandate Communications, and formerly of the Liberal Democrats, says the major difference is that TV
Across the country, election address leaflets from the Labour Party have been dropping through letterboxes – even though the general election campaign has not yet formally started.
These leaflets – delivered free for candidates by the Royal Mail – usually only appear during the campaign itself as candidates make use of the free service which delivers one leaflet from each candidate to each voter.
However, Labour has made use of the special provision which allows leaflets to be delivered earlier, provided the party commits to paying the postage if the candidate in them ends up not being the party’s candidate at the …
The Telegraph has run a story highlighting the number of postal voters who fail to complete the paperwork correctly and so lose their vote:
The Electoral Commission found that five per cent of all postal votes cast were found to be unsafe, because people’s signatures did not match or they gave the wrong date of birth.
Translated nationally this would mean that as many as 240,000 voters – one per cent of all those cast – could be discounted.
Although the word “unsafe” is used, the evidence is that it is innocent mistakes which cause the paperwork to be wrong. For example, …
Stuart Agnew, a UKIP MEP, and Lord Pearson of Rannoch, the party’s leader, have told undercover reporters how a real donor’s name could be kept secret by passing tens of thousands of pounds through intermediaries. If carried out, one or more of the suggested methods could have been illegal.
Our disclosures will embarrass UKIP and Pearson, who also told the undercover reporter that some UKIP members were “neanderthals” and described Agnew, 60, as “one of our only really sane MEPs”.
The report goes on to detail how UKIP explored a range of ways for a donor to hide their …
Latest figures from the Government’s Defence Analytical Services show that more than 34,000 full-time members of the Armed Forces are not registered to vote.
That is 19% of the services, almost one in five of those in uniform – their votes that could be pivotal in a tight contest.
The Electoral Commission has been running a campaign for months to try and persuade those in uniform to register.
However, according to a survey, more than half the military has not seen a leaflet and only 5% have had a Powerpoint presentation on the subject…
Sometimes good intentions don’t quite result in the good outcomes you’d wish. In this case, the issue is a recommendation from the Committee on Standards in Public Life that general election candidates should have to publish their financial interests just as MPs do.
The logic is a good one: if you’re a voter wanting to chose between candidates, it’s a bit odd if you only know about the financial interests of an MP standing for re-election but not of the people they’re up against. You want to know the interests before you cast your vote, not find out afterwards whether or not you should regret your choice.
However, as the committee recognised, its proposals came out too late to change the law for the 2010 general election. Therefore instead the Ministry of Justice has just published a voluntary scheme, detailing a recommended set of questions that candidates should answer about their financial interests.
Perhaps the most controversial will be the section on tax, where people are asked if:
I confirm that, for the tax year 2008/09, I have not claimed to be, or been treated as not resident, not ordinarily resident or non-domiciled in the UK for tax purposes.
Non-doms are a controversial issues anyway; the appearance of this recommendation just before an election is unlikely to cool such partisan passions. When neither Parliament nor the Committee on Standards in Public Life have decided on such a rule (so far – and I hope they do in due course), should the Ministry of Justice unilaterally be slipping it in to a report so soon before an election?
Overall, the recommendations themselves acknowledge that they go beyond what is currently required of MPs. To require candidates to publish the same information as is required of MPs makes obvious sense; for a government ministry to go beyond that off its own bat could turn out to be quite controversial.
With a voluntary code, published rather late in the day and plenty of scope for individual candidates to partially answer the questions, we’re unlikely to see a triumph of transparency that results in voters being significantly better informed. However, it will at the very least provide a test of the different provisions which should make for better legislation when the whole process most likely becomes law during the next Parliament.
As a circular from the Electoral Commission explains:
Until now, members of HM Forces and their spouses or civil partners registering through a service declaration have had to renew their registration every three years. From commencement of The Service Voters’ Registration Period Order 2010 on 19 March 2010, the length of registration based on a service declaration is now five years and so, from 19 March 2010, service voters will only need to renew their registration at the end of a five year period.
The extension of the length of registration will apply to all service personnel and their spouses or
Police forces across England and Wales are teaming up with local councils in a welcome move to encourage agents and candidates to abide by the Postal Voting Code of Conduct. They will be sending letters to agents and candidates asking them to personally sign up to the Code of Conduct.
In previous years the Code has been a national agreement negotiated by the Electoral Commission with, on the one hand, electoral administrators and, on the other, the main political parties. The involvement of both parties and administrators means the Postal Voting Code of Conduct strikes a balance between recognising the genuine …
“Do we have to invite the extremist candidate?” “Can I veto the hustings by refusing to attend?” “Is the hustings meeting an election expense?” These are all common questions during general election campaigns, so here is your whistle-stop guide to what the various rules says.
Political impartiality
Some organisations wish to be impartial, some are forced to be impartial. So does that mean if you are organising a local hustings you need to invite every candidate standing in that constituency? For a regional or national hustings does it mean you have to invite every party who is putting up a candidate in …
With Parliament expected to pass legislation placing an onus on Returning Officers to start general election counts shortly after the polls close, rather than wait until Friday morning, the Electoral Commission has published a draft of the guidance it will be required to issue.
The key points of the guidance are:
If plans are already well advanced for election counts involving starting to count on the Friday, then it may be reasonable for the (Acting) Returning Officer to argue that it is too late for them to change plans.
However, given the legal obligation to take reasonable steps to start counting on the Thursday night, the guidance reminds (Acting) Returning Officers that they will be liable to prosecution (for breach of official duty) if they do not either count on Thursday or have very good, documented reasons for not doing so.
(Acting) Returning Officers should be mindful of the need to properly process postal votes, but this hint at therefore delaying until the Friday is balanced out by some suggestions on how to arrange matters so as to allow a Thursday night count.
The relative costs of running a Thursday night versus a Friday morning count should be considered, but if a Thursday night count would cost more then that is a matter that should be raised with the Ministry for Justice as it is responsible for funding counts (or, in Scotland, the Scotland Office).
In other words, the Electoral Commission has partly put the ball back in the Ministry of Justice’s court. Having been sceptical of the Ministry’s support for this change in the law, the Commission is saying, “if you want it, you’ll have to pay for it”. However, the Electoral Commission has also explicitly reminded (Acting) Returning Officers in the draft guidance that they could be liable under the law if they drag their feet on Thursday counts unreasonably.
Overall, this is guidance that will encourage more rather than fewer to start counting on the Thursday night, particularly if the Ministry of Justice (and Scotland Office) are willing to fund any extra costs involved.
In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Electoral Commission chair Jenny Watson repeated the Commission’s interest in seeing a switch to weekend voting:
Flexible election schedules, including opening the polls for entire weekends, should be considered to make the system more relevant to 21st century life, she said.
In the interview, Jenny Watson also gave her support to the much more controversial issue of looking again at online voting, expressed doubts about how many general …
The 2010 edition of the Electoral Commission’s “Handbook for polling station staff” contains this welcome advice for those staff:
Most electors bring their poll card with them to show to the Poll Clerk even though this is not a requirement for most voters. Offer this poll card back to the elector. It will help them to give information to tellers outside if this is their wish.
It’s a small, but very welcome, recognition of the usefulness of tellers to the health of our electoral system. Tellers are party volunteers who gather information about who has voted. They therefore bring two benefits: first, …
the Florida Election Commission has banned the use of Google Ads because they necessarily do not include the Florida equivalent of an election imprint – as there isn’t enough room. That ruling is being contested, and may yet trigger a change in the law but it shows the risk of doing nothing and hoping all will come out okay.
The ruling was indeed contested and it was decided that the candidate …
Today’s setting of the budget for 24 March means it’s all but certain that the general election will be on 6 May, the date of the scheduled local elections. What that means in terms of deadlines for nominations, applying for postal votes and so on is detailed in this general and local elections 2010 timetable I’ve put together.
Hundreds of local records which would reveal the extent of Lord Ashcroft’s donations to Conservative Party candidates during the crucial last few weeks of the 2005 general election campaign have been destroyed the Electoral Commission has confirmed.
Although the Electoral Commission publishes records of donations made to political parties, donations made specifically to individual candidates during an election campaign are recorded separately.
Those separate records are submitted with candidates’ election expense return forms and stored locally after an election before subsequently being destroyed by the local council. The Electoral Commission also takes in copies of all these returns for its national analysis …
The Hansard Society’s latest Audit of Political Engagement has added to the view that there is likely to be another risible turnout at the impending General Election. The study finds that only 54% say they are certain to vote.
The Hansard Society have offered some ideas about how to boost turnout. They suggest that more should be done to target groups such as the ‘disenchanted and mistrustful’. Apparently, a quarter of adults, mostly young and working-class, fall into this category of voters who distrust politicians but not yet entirely hostile.
Earlier this week the Electoral Commission published a new report, The completeness and accuracy of electoral registers in Great Britain, looking at how electoral registration is working in the UK.
Although it’s been widely covered, the coverage has been very similar – taking the top line figures from the report and covering press release without digging in to what the report really says. So if we venture in to the inner reaches of the report, what do we find?
The report is a very welcome piece of path-breaking research, based on in-depth local studies. Given the importance of registration, and the number of policy and organisational options available to politicians and council officials, gathering this sort of information is extremely useful.
An interim report was published in December (which we covered here) and this final report updates that with more evidence collected.
The use of in-depth local studies is a good move, but it immediately raises a caution about the quoting of figures as if they apply to the country as a whole. The report itself says, “the findings cannot be used to report on national rates of completeness and accuracy.”
However, the report went on to say, “Under-registration and inaccuracy are closely associated with the social groups most likely to move home. Across the seven case study areas in phase two (therefore excluding Knowsley), under-registration is notably higher than average among 17–24 year olds (56% not registered), private sector tenants (49%) and black and minority ethnic (BME) British residents (31%).”
As a result, the 56% has been widely quoted in the media as if it were a national figure, despite the report explicitly saying it isn’t. Take the BBC (“the Electoral Commission has released results that suggests 56% of 17 to 24-year-olds may not be registered to vote”) or the Evening Standard (“The Electoral Commission says that just 56 per cent of young people are registered to vote”). You wouldn’t guess from either of those that “the findings cannot be used to report on national rates”.
What’s more, despite the implicit negative tone of the media’s coverage, the report actually suggests there is good news on electoral registration overall with a long-term decline halted:
Evidence available from electoral statistics and surveys of levels of response to the annual canvass of electors suggests that there was a decline in registration levels from the late 1990s to 2006. The same evidence base suggests that the registers have stabilised since 2006 although it is likely that the completeness of the registers has declined since the last national estimate in 2000.
In addition, the return rate for electoral registration forms across the country, which dropped sharply in 1996-2003 and then declined a little further in 2004 has quickened its recovery: 2007 was up on 2004 and 2008 was up on 2007 by a larger margin. Though the figures are still below the 1996 ones, the trend is heading in the right direction and the figures are higher than in 2005.
Moreover, the figures in the report are based on data taken at one of the worst points in the year for electoral register accuracy.
There is a full update to the electoral register each year, with a new register published on 1 December. It then steadily deteriorates in accuracy through the next year. The register can get updated through the monthly rolling register updates, but people usually leave it until the full register is redone to update their records. If a general election is called, they can however then update their records and still get a vote at their new address.
Therefore, it is normal to see registration levels drop through the year and it isn’t necessarily a cause of worry. By doing their studies on very old registers (eight to ten months old in all the cases used to get the 56% figure and other similar ones), the Commission (and to be fair, they know this and the report makes it clear – if you get to page 16) produced figures which are much lower than if the evidence had been gathered on a new register. Depressing the figures further, the research was done when there was no election in the offing and so people did not have any particular incentive to use rolling registration to update their records.
In other words, the registration figures found are much lower than we’d expect either on a new register or for a general election.
What’s more, the reason for low levels of registration amongst young people in the local studies may have little to do with levels of interest in politics but more to do with mobility:
92% of people who have lived at their current address for five years or more are registered, compared to just 21% among those who have been at their present address for a year or less.
So is it registration or journalism we should be worried about?
One other thing this report tells us is something about the how journalism is works – or doesn’t work. It’s easy to sympathise with hard-pressed journalist taking story and data from reputable source and turning it into story without much questioning. But the data isn’t nearly as uncontroversial as the uniformity of media stories would suggest.
Are the figures for youth registration bad because they’re low, okay because of the time of year they were taken or good because a long-term decline has been halted? You can argue any of the three – and were these figures a matter of political controversy, we’d have had talking heads and quotes arguing the case on each side.
But because there isn’t a National Association for Electoral Registration and Turnout Optimists and there is no argument between the political parties on the statistics, the figures don’t get an external sceptical eye cast over them. Add to this the Electoral Commission’s need to emphasise the importance of people getting registered, which provides an incentive to stress the pessimistic in its figures, and we get just the bad news reported. The good news doesn’t get a look in.
The full report is below and if you need any help to register yourself, visit www.aboutmyvote.co.uk or call the Electoral Commission helpline on 0800 3280 280.
(UPDATE: The Evening Standard, one of the media outlets to get the figures wrong, has now corrected its report.)
This change will (thanks to an amendment to the British Nationality Act 1981, adding Rwanda to the list of Commonwealth countries) come in to force for elections from 10 March.
The Electoral Commission has told me they are about to send a circular out to electoral administrators informing them of the change.
Even if Gordon Brown calls the general election for Thursday 6 May, the date on which local elections are also due to be held, that won’t be the only round of elections this spring.
That’s because the holding of the general election on the same day as local elections means any contested parish and community elections due on 6 May will be postponed by three weeks.
Uncontested elections will still be concluded on 6 May, with people taking office subsequently in the usual way (i.e. on the fourth day after the election). Where there are delayed contested elections, the date of of …
Alistair Carmichael, Liberal Democrat Shadow Scotland Secretary, has tabled amendments to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill aimed at bringing an end to MSPs and MPs holding both jobs at the same time.
The amendments follow legislation backed by both the Government and the Conservatives which seeks to end ‘double jobbing’ by Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly (MLAs) who are also MPs. They offer two options:
a measure which would end the ability of MPs who are also MSPs to receive salaries from both jobs, along the same lines as the Government and Conservative-backed legislation on MLAs and intended to act as
The Electoral Commission’s report into the November 2009 Parliamentary by-election in Glasgow North East has condemned the Labour Party for breaking the Code of Conduct on postal voting, saying the party repeatedly failed to process postal vote forms promptly.
The Code allows parties to distribute to the public forms for signing up to postal votes and to have them returned to a party address. This makes sense in circumstances such as the forms being in with a mailing which also asks for donations to the campaign where giving two different return addresses could result in items going to the wrong place and council staff having to send on political donations to the right address.
However, to guard against misuse the Code – whose provisions the Labour Party has been consulted on annually and each year said it consents to – requires such forms to be passed on by a political party within two working days of receipt.
In Glasgow North East this deadline was broken by the Labour Party and the Electoral Commission says that, “When the Commission reported the concerns that the party had unduly delayed the return of applications for postal votes to the ERO, his staff undertook a spot-check of those applications and discovered that more than 100 forms had been signed and dated by the elector more than a week earlier, and in some cases, more than one month earlier.”
The Labour Party has however defended its actions, with The Guardian reporting that, “The commission’s conclusions were vigorously challenged by the Labour party, which will be asking the commission to justify its report’s conclusions, a spokesman disclosed. He said the report had ignored the significant impact on the delivery of postal vote applications by the postal strike, which had seriously affected every party’s campaign, despite this being highlighted in meetings between Labour and commission officials.”
The Commission was also critical of the long delay by Labour before calling the by-election. “The procedures for calling a by-election are complex and in this instance led to voters being without an MP for nearly five months,” said Jenny Watson, Chair of the Electoral Commission. “The Electoral Commission believes the UK Parliament should consider how long a Westminster seat should be able to remain vacant to ensure voters can elect a new MP in a timely way.”
The public overwhelmingly backs major changes to the way our electoral system is run according to a new poll commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.
Just under two-thirds of people (65%) agree that, “This country should adopt a new voting system that would give parties seats in Parliament in proportion to their share of votes” and 59% support holding a referendum on changing the voting system used for Parliament. That later number is particularly strong given Gordon Brown’s strong support for the idea; usually having an unpopular high profile figure back a policy makes it less popular.
First, I’d met him regularly at Electoral Commission meetings before he became Labour’s General Secretary and he always struck me as a bright, enthusiastic – and young – person. When he was appointed General Secretary I was intrigued as to how someone who seemed so much younger and less experienced in the ways of the Labour Party than previous General Secretaries had made it to the top. For him, it was just nine years from starting work for Labour …
Mailings intended to tell people who have recently moved how to get on the electoral register have mistakenly been going out to people who have not moved in years.
A circular from the Electoral Commission sent to councils around the country explains,
As you will be aware, the Commission is currently running a campaign to encourage home movers to register to vote. It has become apparent that there is a problem with one of the data sources being used for the campaign, resulting in some people who have not recently moved home being sent the mailing in error. We are
Weekend voting has been discussed for a long time. Back in 1991, for example, the all-party Hansard Society’s report Agenda for Change discussed moving voting to a Sunday and highlighted that the Society of Local Authority Chief Exeuctives (SOLACE) backed this idea. Similarly, in 1997, the Home Affairs Select Committee recommended that weekend voting should be tested out.
Partly as a result of this, the system of election pilots that was then put in motion by the 1999 Home Office Working Party on Electoral
The Government has backed a move to amend election law to ensure that general election counts are started on the evening of polling day, exception in exceptional circumstances.
This exception will mean that counts for constituencies where there are severe logistical problems in getting ballot boxes in from polling stations, such as from Scottish islands, are likely to continue to commence on Fridays. However, for other constituencies counts will commence on Thursday evening.
The new clause in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill will require the counting of votes at a UK Parliamentary general elections to commence within four hours of the …
Speaking to the conference of the Association of Electoral Administrators, the Electoral Commission’s Jenny Watson warned those planning to hold general election counts on Friday rather than Thursday night that,
There may not be a lot of sympathy for a count that declares the next day and doesn’t appear to be run efficiently.
Jenny Watson did also highlight the need to ensure accuracy saying,
It is entirely appropriate for returning officers to decide to hold the count the next day – if they are clear that this is necessary to ensure an accurate result.
But as I’ve previously pointed out, the evidence from past …
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...
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Brexit and summer holidays
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The shame of Liverpool Labour councillors taking their allowances but not turning up to do the work
David Allen 
Simon McGrath 
Peter Davies 
Rob Heale 
Kira Collins 