Perhaps the most basic requirement for a local election ballot paper is to the list all the candidates up for election. A bit of a problem then that ballot papers have been going out in several parts of Cornwall with the bottom candidate missing – because the paper was cut in the wrong place by the printers.
As a result, for example, one resident reported that they had binned their ballot paper because they wanted to vote Liberal Democrat, hadn’t found a candidate of ours on the ballot paper and so decided they didn’t want to vote.
The authorities are reacting in the right way to the printers having messed up, with new ballot papers are going out in the post today. However, if someone asked for a postal vote because they were going away, that may be too late for them. Not a good performance by the printers at all.
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7 Comments
Surely the council should of seen a proof before they sent out hundreds of these things. This goes down in the big fail category with them not applying for an airport license in time. Perhaps they don’t want to be re-elected?
Your logic is faulty Steve. Signing off a proof as correct doesn’t protect against a printer then cutting the bits of paper in the wrong place.
Steve – I would hope that the process of approving and organising ballot papers was out of the hands of anyone elected or seeking re-election.
The guillotine operator would have been aware of what he had done – I guess he didn’t draw attention to it because he was afraid of getting into trouble.
So we have lib dems cut off from one postal ballot paper and anothers instructions showing how to vote tory. Not good at all 🙁
A good case for an election petition if a candidate loses by a handful of votes in this situation, I would have thought.
Yes Nigel, but RO’s get away with this sort of incompetence every year, because they know we don’t have the £25,000 for an election petition!