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.
Stoke’s The Sentinel newspaper reports the latest in the case of an election won by one vote with one ballot apparently missing:
The public inquiry, which began on Monday, looked into why 742 postal vote envelopes were counted before election night, of which 26 were rejected, leaving 716, but only 715 were accounted for after the official count.
The petition was rejected by electoral commissioner Richard Mawrey, who said it had led to cumulative costs of six figures for both parties.
He said the “missing” vote could be explained by mistakes in the recording of information on the records.
A PUBLIC inquiry has opened into whether a Stoke-on-Trent City Council election was held according to the law…
In October, Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey counted the ballot papers behind closed doors and ruled a public hearing would have to take place in Stoke-on-Trent. The two-day inquiry began at Hanley Town Hall yesterday.
Ms Maley, of Eaton Street, Northwood, lost out to Liberal Democrat candidate Dave Sutton after several recounts – by just one vote…
It has previously been discovered that 742 postal vote envelopes were counted before election night, of which 26 were rejected, leaving 716. But only 715 were
Back in July last year I blogged about the changes in electoral registration rules which would see people being giving the option to supply additional information, namely their National Insurance number, date of birth and signature, during this year’s electoral registration cycle. That’s part of the phased move to individual registration and gathering this extra information will be the basis for future extra security checks when people vote in person.
But wait, what’s this that the Telegraph “revealed” over the weekend? Ah, that’d be, “Britons to be asked for NI number, date of birth and signature to get right …
Although it’s normal for candidates to leave the security of ballot boxes firmly in the hands of elections staff, there is in fact a long-standing legal right dating back to the 1872 Ballot Act for candidates to put their own seals on ballot boxes.
It is a right that is only rarely used, such as in the 1999 European elections in Haringey. The Conservatives decided to put their own seals on ballot boxes, motivated in part by the usual European rules requiring a 3 day delay between polling day (Thursday) and the count (Sunday). On that occasion the seals caused more concerns …
It has emerged that the Electoral Commission is to review the accounts of the British National party. The BNP submitted a revised set of accounts earlier this month, following concerns that the original set it had given to the commission had not been approved. Following an assessment of the revised accounts, the commission decided that it is “reasonable to assume” a breach of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act has occurred.
The Electoral Commission and police have just published a report into the allegations of electoral practice held in June 2009. What does the latest one show about the state of our electoral system?
The good news is that the headline figures for number of allegations and convictions are relatively modest:
A total of 48 cases involving 107 allegations were recorded by police forces across Great Britain.
The largest single case in Great Britain involved allegations that 24 photocopied ballot papers were sent to a Returning Officer in Aylesbury.
A total of 38 cases (79% of all reported cases) involved only one allegation against a single individual.
Less good is the degree to which time continues to be consumed and hassle generated by imprint issues. Just under one in five of all cases were about imprints. The occasional imprint case involves (alleged) serious abuse – passing off a leaflet as if it were from another party – but many involve simple clerical errors with not only no intent to deceive but with it being clear who the published material was from and how to contact the publisher/promoter.
It is a reminder that good intentions are not enough to keep election agents free from police cautions – or worse – but it is hard to see how this ends up being a good use of time for the police and CPS.
That is particularly so because other, more serious, cases can take a long time to be resolved. At the time of the report, just over a third of cases are still under police investigation or awaiting a decision by the CPS (Crown Office in Scotland). For allegations to be left hanging in the air so long after an election has concluded is highly unsatisfactory.
Of course, electoral law is by no means the only area of law to suffer from this problem and it is an oddity of the tough on crime rhetoric of the last few decades that speeding up the exercise of justice almost never features. Perhaps in part that is because the big losers are the innocent people who have police investigations or charges hanging over them for months and years, with the hurt, anger, disruption and depression that often goes with that. But the hurt and damage done to people who turn out to be innocent is only rarely talked about.
Both the question of imprint allegations clogging up the system and the speed of justice problems are not new and the 2009 round of elections does not seem to have thrown up any new problems or trends in electoral fraud.
With the measures taken over the last few years against postal vote fraud having had a good impact in most areas, the main danger for the future looks to be personation (stealing someone’s vote by turning up to the polling station and pretending to be them). Over a quarter of all cases and nearly half of all allegations arising from the June 2009 elections related to personation.
A plan to try tackling personation by requiring people to sign for their ballot papers (which would provide a paper trail, including finger prints, to help track down fraud as well as providing an extra security check) was previously abandoned in farcical circumstances. Although the law allowed polling station staff to ask for a signature, due to faulty drafting they would still have had to hand over a ballot paper even if someone refused to sign. Hence signing for ballot papers is still stuck in the starting blocks.
Here is the full Electoral Commission / police report:
In 2009 the Conservatives spent £2,482,536 on election expenses for the European elections, just ahead of Labour on £2,302,244 with the Liberal Democrats on £1,180,883.
However, while the Labour figure was up 35% on the 2004 European elections, the Conservatives had cut their spending by 21%. The Liberal Democrat spending was 1% lower.
UKIP spent £1,270,855, a cut of 46%.
In the elections the Conservatives, UKIP and Liberal Democrats each gained a seat while Labour lost five. (Seat change …
An aspiring MP has gone to extreme lengths to protest against the three main political parties.
Adam Osen, 50, has officially changed his name to None Of The Above and hopes to attract support from disillusioned voters as an independent parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green.
The move was suggested by Mr Above’s brother, Gideon, who took the idea from the film Brewster’s Millions, which sees a character run a political campaign under the same slogan.
The former Mr Osen, a painter and decorator of Woodberry Way in Chingford, said his wife, Rebecca, 43, tried to talk him out of the move and many did not believe he would go through with it.
However, he admitted his two children, Gabrielle, 18, and Michael, 15, were less surprised as he has a reputation for coming up with “off the wall” ideas.
Mr Above, or None as he is known to friends, has lost faith in Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative parties since the MPs’ expenses scandal.
The electoral register is the definitive record of who can or can’t vote in a particular election. Missing people means people aren’t able to exercise their democratic rights. Erroneous entries open up possibilities for fraud and for people who shouldn’t vote getting to cast a ballot. Statistics derived from the register are widely used to inform and shape other decisions. So having accurate registers is important.
Knowing how accurate our registers is a tough question to answer. Estimates as to the theoretical electorate if everyone entitled to vote registered – and no-one else – can be derived from population statistics. But those statistics are not perfect and the margins of error on the final calculations make it hard to judge whether our current rates of electoral registration fall at the good or bad end of the fairly narrow band that separates one from another. 98% registration rate would be good; 89% would be bad.
The Electoral Commission has therefore recently been carrying out some in depth research using a series of local case studies scattered across the country. An interim report on them has just been published. What does it say?
The rules against people calling themselves an MP usually get a flurry of publicity in the run-up to a general election. Indeed, it’s part of the pre-election “Will it be an internet election this time?” tradition to have a story about how “MPs who use face disaster because they’ve called themselves an MP”.
This time round it’s been Twitter, with the story that MPs who have chosen a Twitter username containing “MP” will run into problems as they officially stop being MPs when Parliament is dissolved for a general election. So if they tweet during the campaign as if …
The Boundary Committee for England has just published its report into local government arrangements in Devon (including the Lib Dem minority control council of Exeter), Norfolk and Suffolk.
In Devon, the Committee has put forward a single unitary council for the current Devon county area.
In Norfolk, the Committee has put forward a single unitary council for the whole of Norfolk.
In Suffolk, the Committee has made two proposals: a unitary county of Suffolk (the Committee’s preferred alternative proposal for Suffolk); and a two-unitary pattern comprising an Ipswich & Felixstowe authority and a Rural Suffolk authority.
One of the quirks of Britain’s imperial past is that Commonwealth citizens living here are able to vote, including in Parliamentary elections. This includes Mozambique residents who are able to vote because, although Mozambique was not part of the British empire, it was admitted to the Commonwealth in 1995 for political reasons.
The average length of Parliamentary by-election campaign has shrunk by four weeks since the 1970s, sharply narrowing the chance for the public to find out about the candidates presented to them and stifling openness in the candidate selection processes which frequently now have to be run at break-neck pace.
The legal timetable for a Parliamentary by-election between moving of writ and polling day has some scope for variation, but essentially is three weeks. However, there is no fixed time between a seat falling vacant, e.g. due to an MP dying or stepping down, and the writ being moved.
The Ministry of Justice is running a consultation on whether bodies such as marketing firms and charities should be able to buy copies of the electoral register to use for their direct mail and other operations. There is a high chance this review could lead to a change in the law.
There are currently three electoral registers:
The full electoral register, which is used for running elections and which is available to political parties and election candidates for them to contact voters and other electoral purposes. It is also available to various law enforcement and other public sector organisations for use in
In a written answer in Parliament this week, Jack Straw confirmed that several more parts of the Polities Parties and Elections Act 2009 are now kicking in or will do so soon. There don’t look to be any surprises in the list and dates he’s given. Most importantly, the new election expense provisions with a long and short campaign period are taking force as expected.
Over the last few years a wide range of attempts have been made to raise turnout at elections in the UK. The broad conclusion is very simple: all-postal ballots raise turnout significantly (albeit at the cost of various drawbacks) and nothing else that has been tried does so. E-voting, early voting, voting by text, and many others: all been tried, all flopped.
However, there are signs that moving to voting at the weekend may be coming back on the electoral administration agenda.
It is easy to see why weekend voting may appeal. Fewer people work at the weekend which could mean people are more likely to have time to go and vote, plus in turn candidates are more likely to be able to get volunteers out campaigning on polling day reminding people to vote.
The main drawbacks are also fairly straight-forward.
Controversy over Lord Ashcroft’s donations to the Conservative party deepened last night after Labour MPs demanded an urgent meeting with Britain’s elections watchdog.
Placing more pressure on the Tories, Labour MPs want to know why the Electoral Commission’s official inquiry into an Ashcroft-controlled company, which has given £3m to the party, has dragged on for 10 months and threatens to run into the general election campaign.
Earlier this week I went to meet with the Electoral Commission to discuss their plans for encouraging better practice at election counts. Having spotted my views, they invited me thinking I might be interested in their plans – and kudos to the Electoral Commission for willing to talk in this way.
The plans are still in draft and subject to consultation, so I won’t go in to details about them now, but the overall move is towards having a recommended set of count procedures and accompanying forms which are (a) a big improvement on the current situation, (b) produce more …
A week today, starting at 10am on Monday 16th November, an act of political record keeping resurrection will commence as the lost marked register from the Glenrothes Westminster Parliamentary by-election is recreated.
The lost of the Glenrothes marked register caused more controversy than such loses usually do both because it happened at a Parliamentary by-election and because the result in that election was, to many people, a surprise.
The Goverment’s reaction to the loss of marked registers after the 2005 general election was underwhelming. As I described it in February:
In other words : ‘we don’t know on what dates records were
The headline recommendations from Sir Christopher Kelley’s review of MPs’ expenses have been widely covered. Despite this coverage, there is a series of detailed proposals which have been largely overlooked – including one which may yet put the leaders of political parties on the spot over cases involving their own MPs which they thought they had dealt with.
Travel: “MPs should expect to be treated in the same way as their constituents in this regard, unless there are compelling reasons to the contrary. That …
The BBC Trust is running an online survey asking for views on its plans for a new complaints procedure for Party Election Broadcasts. Although the BBC generally steers clear of the content of PEBs – leaving that to the parties in question – there are often issues around who gets how many and when they are shown.
Therefore it is good to see the BBC Trust proposing a clearer and more rigorous process – and also asking for views on these proposals.
(Controversies over the content of PEBs also sometimes rears its head, though these proposals do not cover the system for …
Although this summer’s Parliamentary by-election in Norwich North kicked off much subsequent debate about the alleged benefits of Friday (rather than Thursday night) counts after it was counted on a Friday, a close reading of the Electoral Commission’s report into the Norwich North by-election reveals that in fact the Norwich experience undermines the case made for moving to Friday counts.
One of the arguments used for favouring Friday counts over Thursday nights is that the anti-postal vote fraud measures introduced in recent years mean that far more checking is required of postal votes than previously, …
A pair of election fraudsters jailed for the ghost vote scandal which rocked Slough politics have failed in an appeal against their convictions.
Tory candidate Raja Mohammed Eshaq Khan … admitted conspiracy to defraud and perjury at Reading Crown Court in January and was jailed for three-and-a-half years.
Mahboob Khan, 46, of Quinbrookes, Slough was convicted of conspiracy to defraud, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and perjury and jailed for four-and-a-half years.
Blink and you might have missed it: first details of a discussion about ways to cut the costs of running elections are leaked and then Jack Straw promptly disowns them and kills off the discussion.
Given how weak the proposals were – and the relatively small sums involved – I think that was the right decision by Straw and, although he and Liberal Democrats are usually not the best of friends, I think there’ll be widespread agreement in the Lib Dems with his comment, “Democracy has to be paid for”. Ideas such as replacing the general election freepost leaflets with one booklet would go quite against the current appetitie from the public to hear more from individual candidates about what the believe and what they want to do.
There are, though, three lessons to learn from the ideas that were floated.
Good news all in all for both the Electoral Commission and for the laws regulating donations to political parties with the decision today by an Appeal Court to overturn a previous strange ruling by a magistrate in the case of a series of donations to UKIP that the Electoral Commission had investigated and decided broke the law.
The donations, from an Alan Bown, totalled £367,697 and were given by him personally, despite not being on the electoral register at the time. This made them impermissible. Until this case, everyone’s interpretation of the law had been that, for better or worse, it …
Both the recent controversies over whether or not general election counts should take place on the Thursday night and whether or not the 2012 London Mayor and Assembly elections should use e-counting touch, in part, on the question of the accuracy of manual counts.
This is an area where systematic evidence is very thin on the ground.
The Electoral Commission has published a report laying out a series of detailed and powerful criticisms of the cost-benefit analysis carried out for the Greater London Returning Officer into the use of e-counting for the 2012 London Mayor and Assembly elections.
However, the Greater London Returning Officer (GLRO) appears determined to go ahead with electronic counting, having told a meeting he had made this decision before even hearing the Electoral Commission’s views and despite even the flawed cost-benefit analysis showing that e-counting is more expensive than manual counting.
Last week the BBC picked up on a blog post of mine about the failure of the Government to use existing legal powers to draw up rules for election imprints in the online world. The Government’s response was, essentially, that it’s not possible to come up with rules for such a fast-moving area.
I think that’s wrong – websites and email have been around for more than a decade, and whilst new services do comes along (most notably Twitter since the last general election) a set of rules which was updated once a Parliament would be able to cope.
Peter Hirst Inequality must be seen in the round. I appreciate living in the north-west because it gives me easy access to mountains such as in Snowdonia, The Lakes and Der...
Peter Hirst One of the aims of most societies is some sort of redistribution. So fiscal federalism must have a mechanism for the rich regions giving to the poorer. Without ...
Peter Martin The price mechanism is essentially a system of rationing. In wartime it is usually recognised that it isn't the most equitable system! So some better system h...
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 ...
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Brexit and summer holidays
The pine martens of Shropshire
The shame of Liverpool Labour councillors taking their allowances but not turning up to do the work
Peter Hirst 
Peter Martin 
David Allen 
Simon McGrath 