The 2010 edition of the Electoral Commission’s “Handbook for polling station staff” contains this welcome advice for those staff:
Most electors bring their poll card with them to show to the Poll Clerk even though this is not a requirement for most voters. Offer this poll card back to the elector. It will help them to give information to tellers outside if this is their wish.
It’s a small, but very welcome, recognition of the usefulness of tellers to the health of our electoral system. Tellers are party volunteers who gather information about who has voted. They therefore bring two benefits: first, …
Hundreds of local records which would reveal the extent of Lord Ashcroft’s donations to Conservative Party candidates during the crucial last few weeks of the 2005 general election campaign have been destroyed the Electoral Commission has confirmed.
Although the Electoral Commission publishes records of donations made to political parties, donations made specifically to individual candidates during an election campaign are recorded separately.
Those separate records are submitted with candidates’ election expense return forms and stored locally after an election before subsequently being destroyed by the local council. The Electoral Commission also takes in copies of all these returns for its national analysis …
The Hansard Society’s latest Audit of Political Engagement has added to the view that there is likely to be another risible turnout at the impending General Election. The study finds that only 54% say they are certain to vote.
The Hansard Society have offered some ideas about how to boost turnout. They suggest that more should be done to target groups such as the ‘disenchanted and mistrustful’. Apparently, a quarter of adults, mostly young and working-class, fall into this category of voters who distrust politicians but not yet entirely hostile.
Earlier this week the Electoral Commission published a new report, The completeness and accuracy of electoral registers in Great Britain, looking at how electoral registration is working in the UK.
Although it’s been widely covered, the coverage has been very similar – taking the top line figures from the report and covering press release without digging in to what the report really says. So if we venture in to the inner reaches of the report, what do we find?
The report is a very welcome piece of path-breaking research, based on in-depth local studies. Given the importance of registration, and the number of policy and organisational options available to politicians and council officials, gathering this sort of information is extremely useful.
An interim report was published in December (which we covered here) and this final report updates that with more evidence collected.
The use of in-depth local studies is a good move, but it immediately raises a caution about the quoting of figures as if they apply to the country as a whole. The report itself says, “the findings cannot be used to report on national rates of completeness and accuracy.”
However, the report went on to say, “Under-registration and inaccuracy are closely associated with the social groups most likely to move home. Across the seven case study areas in phase two (therefore excluding Knowsley), under-registration is notably higher than average among 17–24 year olds (56% not registered), private sector tenants (49%) and black and minority ethnic (BME) British residents (31%).”
As a result, the 56% has been widely quoted in the media as if it were a national figure, despite the report explicitly saying it isn’t. Take the BBC (“the Electoral Commission has released results that suggests 56% of 17 to 24-year-olds may not be registered to vote”) or the Evening Standard (“The Electoral Commission says that just 56 per cent of young people are registered to vote”). You wouldn’t guess from either of those that “the findings cannot be used to report on national rates”.
What’s more, despite the implicit negative tone of the media’s coverage, the report actually suggests there is good news on electoral registration overall with a long-term decline halted:
Evidence available from electoral statistics and surveys of levels of response to the annual canvass of electors suggests that there was a decline in registration levels from the late 1990s to 2006. The same evidence base suggests that the registers have stabilised since 2006 although it is likely that the completeness of the registers has declined since the last national estimate in 2000.
In addition, the return rate for electoral registration forms across the country, which dropped sharply in 1996-2003 and then declined a little further in 2004 has quickened its recovery: 2007 was up on 2004 and 2008 was up on 2007 by a larger margin. Though the figures are still below the 1996 ones, the trend is heading in the right direction and the figures are higher than in 2005.
Moreover, the figures in the report are based on data taken at one of the worst points in the year for electoral register accuracy.
There is a full update to the electoral register each year, with a new register published on 1 December. It then steadily deteriorates in accuracy through the next year. The register can get updated through the monthly rolling register updates, but people usually leave it until the full register is redone to update their records. If a general election is called, they can however then update their records and still get a vote at their new address.
Therefore, it is normal to see registration levels drop through the year and it isn’t necessarily a cause of worry. By doing their studies on very old registers (eight to ten months old in all the cases used to get the 56% figure and other similar ones), the Commission (and to be fair, they know this and the report makes it clear – if you get to page 16) produced figures which are much lower than if the evidence had been gathered on a new register. Depressing the figures further, the research was done when there was no election in the offing and so people did not have any particular incentive to use rolling registration to update their records.
In other words, the registration figures found are much lower than we’d expect either on a new register or for a general election.
What’s more, the reason for low levels of registration amongst young people in the local studies may have little to do with levels of interest in politics but more to do with mobility:
92% of people who have lived at their current address for five years or more are registered, compared to just 21% among those who have been at their present address for a year or less.
So is it registration or journalism we should be worried about?
One other thing this report tells us is something about the how journalism is works – or doesn’t work. It’s easy to sympathise with hard-pressed journalist taking story and data from reputable source and turning it into story without much questioning. But the data isn’t nearly as uncontroversial as the uniformity of media stories would suggest.
Are the figures for youth registration bad because they’re low, okay because of the time of year they were taken or good because a long-term decline has been halted? You can argue any of the three – and were these figures a matter of political controversy, we’d have had talking heads and quotes arguing the case on each side.
But because there isn’t a National Association for Electoral Registration and Turnout Optimists and there is no argument between the political parties on the statistics, the figures don’t get an external sceptical eye cast over them. Add to this the Electoral Commission’s need to emphasise the importance of people getting registered, which provides an incentive to stress the pessimistic in its figures, and we get just the bad news reported. The good news doesn’t get a look in.
The full report is below and if you need any help to register yourself, visit www.aboutmyvote.co.uk or call the Electoral Commission helpline on 0800 3280 280.
(UPDATE: The Evening Standard, one of the media outlets to get the figures wrong, has now corrected its report.)
This change will (thanks to an amendment to the British Nationality Act 1981, adding Rwanda to the list of Commonwealth countries) come in to force for elections from 10 March.
The Electoral Commission has told me they are about to send a circular out to electoral administrators informing them of the change.
Welcome to Friday, and with another busy campaigning weekend ahead, political parties are counting down the days and counting up the cash:
2 Election War Chest Stories
Labour opts for bargain £4m campaign with no posters
For the first time in more than 60 years, Labour does not plan to use its scarce resources on high street posters, such as those that the big-spending Conservatives have already set up across Britain. Instead, officials say that Gordon Brown will make a virtue out of necessity with a campaign that will lean on the “word of mouth” community organising techniques that helped Barack Obama into the White House.
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.”
The public overwhelmingly backs major changes to the way our electoral system is run according to a new poll commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.
Just under two-thirds of people (65%) agree that, “This country should adopt a new voting system that would give parties seats in Parliament in proportion to their share of votes” and 59% support holding a referendum on changing the voting system used for Parliament. That later number is particularly strong given Gordon Brown’s strong support for the idea; usually having an unpopular high profile figure back a policy makes it less popular.
First, I’d met him regularly at Electoral Commission meetings before he became Labour’s General Secretary and he always struck me as a bright, enthusiastic – and young – person. When he was appointed General Secretary I was intrigued as to how someone who seemed so much younger and less experienced in the ways of the Labour Party than previous General Secretaries had made it to the top. For him, it was just nine years from starting work for Labour …
Mailings intended to tell people who have recently moved how to get on the electoral register have mistakenly been going out to people who have not moved in years.
A circular from the Electoral Commission sent to councils around the country explains,
As you will be aware, the Commission is currently running a campaign to encourage home movers to register to vote. It has become apparent that there is a problem with one of the data sources being used for the campaign, resulting in some people who have not recently moved home being sent the mailing in error. We are
Speaking to the conference of the Association of Electoral Administrators, the Electoral Commission’s Jenny Watson warned those planning to hold general election counts on Friday rather than Thursday night that,
There may not be a lot of sympathy for a count that declares the next day and doesn’t appear to be run efficiently.
Jenny Watson did also highlight the need to ensure accuracy saying,
It is entirely appropriate for returning officers to decide to hold the count the next day – if they are clear that this is necessary to ensure an accurate result.
But as I’ve previously pointed out, the evidence from past …
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:
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?
By Helen Duffett
| Tue 15th December 2009 - 12:05 pm
Latest figures from the Electoral Commission reveal that Zac Goldsmith, Conservative candidate for Richmond Park, has spent more than a quarter of a million pounds of his own money in the hope of getting elected.
From today’s London Evening Standard:
“The environmentalist has donated £260,000 since he was selected to fight the Richmond Park seat in 2007, according to the latest figures from the Electoral Commission…
“Virtually all of the money goes to office staff and “office costs”. The party says that Mr Goldsmith set up his own office in Richmond, separate to the local association’s headquarters. The candidate employs two members
The Electoral Commission will be asked whether a Conservative Vice Chair has broken the law in the marginal constituency she is contesting at the next election.
Margot James is the Conservative candidate in Stourbridge – one of the most marginal seats in the country.
The seat’s current Labour MP, Lynda Waltho, is to ask the Electoral Commission for clarification of the law on “treating”.
At issue is whether Ms James might have committed an offence by hosting a lunch for a group of pensioners at her constituency home and some receptions for the local Muslim community.
A new survey out from the British Computer Society / Chartered Institute for IT says that “Only 53% of Britons can name their MP”.
Whilst it’s not a number to make democrats cheer to the rafters, the use of “only” is rather misleading as this figure is in fact a substantial increase on previous research. For example, an Electoral Commission / Hansard Society report in 2004 found that 42% could name their MP. Other previous research has also found figures under 50%.
If anything, the 53% finding is cautious (because of issues around details of research and margins of …
“Nearly three-quarters (74%) of people aged 65 or over said that they had voted in the European Parliamentary elections, compared with only 13% of those aged 18 to 24.”
In June’s European elections, turnout amongst postal voters was 64% in Great Britain. Turnout amongst non-postal voters was 30% – a full 34 percentage points lower. There’s a lesson in there about campaigning…
The figures for the different regions were:
South East 68% (+34%)
South West 68% (+33%)
East Midlands 67% (+34%)
Eastern 67% (+33%)
West Midlands 66% (+35%)
Scotland 63% (+39%)
Yorkshire & The Humber 63% (+37%)
North West 63% (+37%)
Wales 62% (+36%)
London 61% (+31%)
North East 59% (+38%)
The Isles of Scilly were the only area where turnout amongst postal voters was lower than that amongst non-postal voters (by two percentage points).
Donations by 5th Avenue Partners Limited to the Liberal Democrats: statement
20 Nov 2009
The Electoral Commission, the independent elections and party finance watchdog, today announced the outcome of its investigation into donations made by the company 5th Avenue Partners Ltd to the Liberal Democrats. Donations totalling over £2.4m were made in 2005.
The investigation considered whether there had been breaches of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 (PPERA). In particular, it looked at whether the company, reported as the donor, was a permissible donor. It also considered whether the company
That’s what the Electoral Commission is suggesting in its ‘farewell’ press release to mark the handing over of responsibilities for local government boundaries to a new body:
Max Caller, Chair of the Boundary Committee and Electoral Commissioner, said: “The new Local Government Boundary Commission for England’s job will be to keep the map of local government in England in good repair. Having fair local electoral arrangements is important to ensure that every voter, wherever they live in a council area, has a vote of similar weight in electing their representatives.
“We estimate that, by 2014, a quarter of all English local
Figures revealing which party’s candidates were most likely to do leafleting, canvassing, internet campaigning and a set of other activities have just been published by the Electoral Commission.
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 …
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, …
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, though you’d be hard press to spot it from the media reports. On a like-for-like basis turnout was up significantly in the Bedford Mayor election this week.
In the first Mayor election, in October 2002, turnout was just 25% whilst this Thursday it was up to 31%. Six percentage points is a big increase, particularly from a base of only 25%.
Ah, you might be saying – but wasn’t turnout higher in the Mayor election in between those two? Yes, in the May 2007 Mayoral election in Bedford turnout was 41%. However, that election coincided …
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 …
Roland @Peter - I agree with your point which seems to apply to many sectors, especially those sectors that previously had been state controlled/owned eg. Energy, wate...
Chris Cory This article gives me real hope. So much of our politics is about winning. Beating the other lot because we all know that we have all the answers and they kno...
Robert Knight The statistic that you carefully avoided was the 22000 Iranian uranium centrifuges, the largest number manufactured and operated by any country, that have been ...
Alex Macfie @theakes: No, we didn't "win" under FPTP in 2024, we broke even (with a share of seats roughly equal to our share of the vote. Just because the system worked fo...
Tom Bailey Our Police are the finest in the World, here they are in action.
https://x.com/JamesPGoddard90/status/2068912835376357857...
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
What remains of the locations where Hue and Cry was filmed
Latest voting intention and leadership ratings opinion polls
Roland 
Chris Cory 
Robert Knight 
Alex Macfie 
Tom Bailey 