Mark Pack

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.