Tag Archives: wolverhampton city council

Marked registers lost, votes counted up wrongly – but Returning Officer judged to have met performance standards

By Mark Pack | Wed 8th December 2010 - 11:55 am

My original headline was going to be “One-third of (Acting) Returning Officers assess their own performance wrongly”, but the more closely I look at the latest Returning Officer performance data from the Electoral Commission, the worse it looks.

A sample survey by the Electoral Commission of the performance self-assessment exercise by (Acting) Returning Officers found that 33 out of 100 had assessed their own performance wrongly. The findings, detailed in the Commission’s report on the latest performance standards (p.6-7), call into question how useful the assessment system really is.

But even worse than this headline figure, in Wolverhampton the Returning Officer …

Posted in Election law and News | Also tagged electoral commission and wolverhampton south west | 3 Comments

Wolverhampton election investigation raises more doubts over how election was run

By Mark Pack | Tue 16th November 2010 - 12:26 pm

Following the revelations that the Wolverhampton South West result showed more ballot papers being counted than had been issued and that the official marked register for part of the constituency had gone missing both Wolverhampton Council and the Electoral Commission have been investigating.

The investigations have not only failed to locate the missing electoral register but also found that part of the marked register also went missing in a second Parliamentary constituency, Wolverhampton North East.

Meanwhile, the investigation into the ballot paper number discrepancy …

Posted in Election law | Also tagged wolverhampton south west | 4 Comments

The mysterious 66 votes in Wolverhampton South West

By Mark Pack | Wed 25th August 2010 - 9:54 am

According to the official election results, Wolverhampton South West saw more votes cast than there had been ballot papers issued.

At the count there were 40,160 votes totalled up in the general election in May. However, the official records show that only 40,094 ballot papers should have been in the count, 66 less than the number of votes counted. This is not a simple matter of a typo in the official records, because Wolverhampton Council has confirmed that these two figures are the ones official …

Posted in Election law | Also tagged wolverhampton south west | 10 Comments