From The Sentinel newspaper:
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 accounted for after the official count.
The one missing slip could have given Mrs Maley a tie, if it was in her favour.
You can read the full report here, but of potentially the greatest significance for other elections is the question of the accuracy of machines used to process postal ballots:
The hearing also heard that a machine which verified postal vote ballot papers only had a record of 712.
A range of different possible explanations for the difference between this figure of 712 and the totals of 715 or 716 has been offered. However, if the question of the machines’ accuracy stays disputed then this case might result in councils having to tighten up their procedures for checking that machinery is counting accurately.
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5 Comments
Fuck the machines – let’s do it the BEST way – by hand
There is no excuse for being unable to count 700 items correctly. None at all.
There will of course be no investigation into who screwed up, and no penalties for doing so.
Open Rights Group have some worrying statistics about the use of e-counting machines during the London Mayoral elections…
Why the hell were machines needed to count 700 odd votes. I could probably do that singlehanded in an hour or so and surely they already have hand counters for the rest of the ballots. :-S
Peter1919: the machines scan the signatures to check them against the signatures given when postal voters were applied for. They weren’t being used to count ballot papers as such.
Dave: absolutely. The published results also contained errors (see my blog posts https://www.libdemvoice.org/more-london-election-errors-the-results-have-the-wrong-number-of-wards-2695.html and https://www.libdemvoice.org/london-mayor-election-2687.html ).
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[…] 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 […]