The London Assembly has unanimously passed a motion calling for an investigation into how polling was conducted for the general and council elections in May.
From the BBC:
The review comes after hundreds of Londoners were unable to vote and left queuing as polling booths closed.
About 300 people were turned away in Lewisham and another 150 were unable to vote in Hackney. Long queues were also seen in Vauxhall and Brockley.
The review will look at the issues of overcrowding and as well as allegations of electoral fraud.
The review will be conducted by the Business Management and Administration Committee, although it’s not yet clear exactly how the investigation will operate.
Caroline Pidgeon, who is Deputy Chair of the committee and Leader of the Liberal Democrat London Assembly Group told Lib Dem Voice,
The conduct of free and fair elections should be at the very heart of a healthy democracy yet sadly the experiences of 6th May exposed the need for an urgent review.
We need to quickly learn lessons from the problems that occurred at a number of polling stations and especially why some Londoners were even denied the right to vote. Only then can we make sure that the events of 6th May never take place again.
The Assembly aims to “implement measures in time to ensure the integrity and efficiency of the Greater London Elections in 2012.”
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2 Comments
I know the voters are always right etc blah blah, but surely the dumb ***** should’ve known to get there well in advance of 10, like y’know, any of the previous 15 hours the polling station was open, if they were serious about voting? Sounds like they were bored and just wanted to kick up a fuss to cover up their own lack of punctuality.
I don’t recall there being serious polling station congestion at close of polls in previous elections.
Hackney and Lewisham have in common that both have the executive mayor system, so voters were issued with three ballot papers – MP, mayor, and councillors, each using a different electoral system. Many of the voters were hardly aware there were local elections, and were taken by surprise coming to the polling station with the intention of just voting X for one party, being given another paper on which they had to mark two Xs and another on which they had to mark three Xs. Every voter had to have this explained to them as the papers were issued. So it’s not surprising those boroughs in particular saw these problems. Newham also has an executive mayor system, but it’s such a one-party state in terms of candidates never mind winners that the three-vote councillors papers were less of a handful.
In normal local elections, the people voting tend to be people who usually vote in local elections so are familiar with it, though there’s still many who haven’t grasped how to work the SV system used to elect executive mayors. But here we had people who maybe never vote in local elections being thrown into it. This must surely be a big part of the reason the queues built up. It also led to somewhat random results in the local elections for councillors where there were all-up three-seat wards (which covers all of London), as people who weren’t expecting a paper where they had to put three Xs dotted theirs around. Mostly it was to the benefit of those at the top of the ballot paper, as quite a few voters seemed to think “Hmm, there’s one of my party here, and there’s one here, oh and let’s give one vote to another party, just here” without even getting to the bottom of the paper.