Moments ago, voting opened in the elections for Party President, and Federal Committees (including English, Scottish and Councillor Representatives).
Yesterday, I visited the (very secure) printer in Scunthorpe where the 13,000 postal ballots are being printed and I’m happy to confirm everything is very much on track and I’ve spent the morning triple checking the online ballot and emails.
Fingers crossed, everything should go off without a hitch.
But I’m sure many of you have questions about how this last and most important part of the process works, so here’s everything you need to know!
How the process works:
If the party has an email on file for you, you’ll be voting online.
You’ll get an email today between 1100 and 2330. The emails are being sent in batches of 5,000 to try and ensure as many as possible get through.
Please don’t panic if you’re not in the first batch, the rest will be sent through the day.
The email is coming from [email protected], the sender name will be Nick Harvey and the subject line will be “IMPORTANT: Your ballot paper”.
It’s worth checking your spam/promotions folder if you can’t find it, as it may have gone astray in there.
If we can’t deliver to your email address for any reason, we’ll dispatch a postal ballot as soon as possible on Monday.
If you can’t find that email by 9am on Sunday morning, please email [email protected] – this is a priority elections inbox and queries about the election sent here will be responded to within 72 hours (starting Monday).
If the party doesn’t have an email on file for you, then you’ll be getting a postal ballot.
The first group were mailed out yesterday, the second group will be mailed out on Monday and any additional ballots we have to add because of email issues will be mailed out Tuesday, so all of those should have arrived by Wednesday/Thursday.
Manifestos are included with the ballot and you should also be able to find them all here
You can also find out more about the positions up for election here.
If you have questions for any of the candidates or want to know more before you vote, then we’ve set up an easy way to quiz them. You just need to join the Internal Elections Discussion group on Facebook, which you can do here.
Lastly, as I’m sure you can imagine, running these elections costs money – and that’s money we can’t spend on campaigning (and we might need to spend some money on campaigning in the next few weeks!).
Please do consider donating whatever you can afford to help with the cost of these elections (and any extra we raise will be put towards the General Election). You can donate online now.
Good luck to all of the candidates standing in these elections and happy voting!
* Greg Foster is the Liberal Democrats' Head of Technology
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8 Comments
As of 11.40am on Saturday October 26th, the mi-vote.com website is not working. Currently saying “Error 524 – A Timeout Occurred”. Overloaded server, presumably. How many simultaneous voters can it cope with? I’ve now got no clue if I can actually vote since it took my voter ID and sat spinning for several minutes before the timeout. Not exactly a sparkling introduction to the brave new world of electronic voting.
Website still not responding properly. I got in contact with the technical support person from mi-voice who says :
Dear Paul
Unfortunately, there was no throttling of the e-mail by the Party, so the entire membership has received the email at the same time.
This has put the servers under a significant load and caused the performance issues you are experiencing.
I can only apologise for the inconvenience this is causing and ask that you try again a little later.
Can supporters vote in the internal elections or is it just members?
Marc only members can vote.
I am of the opinion that members pay and as supporters have to pay nothing then there has to be benefits of membership which are not available to supporters.
Having said that I still am unable to vote as the site is either suspended for me or too busy.
amazing, minutes after posting the above the voting site started working for me 🙂
I voted in 6 out of 7 elections this morning, took the time to read profiles for those I did not know. Took a break between each. Then the last one came up with an error message. Repeated with every attempt through the day. Until just now, when it let me in again. To then find every election open, as if I had done nothing this morning. So a complete waste of 2 hours. If you are a candidate you won’t know whether I did or didn’t attempt to vote for you this morning. You can be absolutely certain I won’t be voting for you now.
I had similar problems, I reccomend writing all your thoughts down as you go along, that way you dont lose decisiona already made. it does seem a clunky site to me as a complete ignoramus on computing.
Just to make people aware I had an email from Nick Harvey this morning that some votes have been disqualified and you need to vote again.
He said:
“Unfortunately, we have identified that a number of candidates’ manifestos were missed off the ballot due to human error when you cast your vote.
As a result, these candidates may have been unfairly disadvantaged and in my capacity as Returning Officer for these elections, I have decided to invalidate your vote and ask you to cast it again.
We would also ask you to very carefully re-read the manifestos before voting again. “.
This doesn’t seem an acceptable way to run things. I’ve raised an appeal with the Federal Appeals Panel as to whether the RO does have the power to do this.