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.”
You can read the full report here:
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
The Disneyfication of Haley Mills
Survation now put Andy Burnham 10 points ahead in Makerfield
Michael Meadowcroft: A Liberal of Intellectual Rigour and Uncommon Integrity
Debt-ridden graduates claim they are seen as cash cows
Ruth Bright
BigTallTim
Daniel Walker
Richard Good
Matt (Bristol)
6 Comments
I know of far worse things than this that Labour have done involving postal votes
I don’t quite follow this. Surely it’s not to a party’s advantage to delay forwarding postal vote applications from its supporters?
This seems to be evidence only of incompetence – and incompetence that tends to disadvantage the Labour party.
“Surely it’s not to a party’s advantage to delay forwarding postal vote applications from its supporters?”
Except, of course, that potentially the Labour Party could send out postal vote applications to everyone, and then sieve out the Tories and Lib Dems, who will be ‘forgotten about’, whereas the Labour faithful will receive postal votes. I’m not alleging that’s what happened, in fact I would be surprised if that were the case, but that’s why the code of conduct is in place.
“I would be surprised if that were the case”
I’d be _amazed_ if any but the looniest Tories and Lib Dems sent their postal application form to the Labour party to forward to the local authority!
In addition – if you sit on a postal application form, other parties don’t know someone will get a postal vote. That matters because postal ballots go out – and many are returned – before polling day, so if you know someone has a postal vote a campaign often puts in extra effort to persuade them to vote for them earlier in the campaign as they end up voting earlier. But you can’t do that if you don’t know they’re going to have a postal vote (and yes, this earlier extra campaigning is worthwhile and can persuade people who have applied for a postal vote via party X to vote instead for party Y).
Ah – so that’s what they were up to!
I just wasn’t Machiavellian enough to work it out.