Tag Archives: havering council

Mark Pack

Havering Council changes its rolling electoral registration policy, again

By Mark Pack | Fri 4th February 2011 - 5:55 pm

In the run-up to the general election, I wrote about Havering Council’s stated public policy of rejecting applications to join the electoral register from people if they were made on forms downloaded from the Electoral Commission’s own dedicated website. It was a policy that caused complaints from residents as well as raising questions about why a council would blanket reject applications from people using the Electoral Commission’s own nationally advertised website.

This policy arose from Havering Council’s reaction to a previous set of attempts to make false electoral register entries, which led it to decide that it would not accept …

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Posted in News | Also tagged and | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

Electoral administration isn’t going quite as well as it should…

By Mark Pack | Sat 1st May 2010 - 11:20 am

First, the good news: all the reports so far indicated a strong surge in people registering just before the deadline earlier this month. The Independent has some further figures to add to earlier reports. Thankfully, Havering Council with its hostile approach to people using the Electoral Commission’s website seems to be very much the exception. Whilst its electoral division has called “ridiculous” the number of people registering at the last moment, other councils have welcomed the surge of interest rather than criticised it.

Then the not so good news…

Allegations of postal vote fraud: the scale of the allegations, …

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Posted in Election law | Also tagged , , , , , , and | 6 Comments
Mark Pack

Havering Council flirts with breaking election law

By Mark Pack | Wed 21st April 2010 - 12:20 pm

Until yesterday, Havering Council was telling residents that it would reject any rolling registration applications that were not made on the council’s own form – despite the fact that such rejections would be a breach of the law. In a bizarre twist, it also meant that Havering Council was telling people who had filled in an electoral registration form via the Electoral Commission’s heavily advertised website, AboutMyVote.co.uk, that those applications were invalid.

As one resident who used the Electoral  Commission’s site reported, he received a letter from the council saying,

We do not accept internet forms.

and warning that unless a second …

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Posted in Election law | Also tagged , , and | Leave a comment
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