Performance standards introduced for Returning Officers in Britain

The varying quality of electoral administration

The quality of Returning Officers and their staff has always been very variable. Ask anyone who has been involved in elections across different areas, and the chances are they have a store of horror stories about just how bad things get in some areas at times.

My own favourite? The Returning Officer in a Parliamentary by-election in the 1990s who said to myself and the Liberal Democrat agent, “I suppose, as it’s a Parliamentary by-election, you’ll be expecting us to count all the votes this time?”. Err, yes.

Why electoral services don’t get more attention

There are a range of structural issues which help explain the variation. Perhaps most important is that whilst having a functioning democracy is vital, the immediate impact of mistakes in running an election is usually a lot less than in other areas of council activity.

Late provision of postal voter lists may be a real pain for campaigns wanting to contact postal voters before they vote, but that is pretty small beer compared with the impact of late provision of paperwork to social workers, where in tragic cases it ends up being a matter of life and death. As a result, electoral services do not get the attention and resources of other areas, and find it harder to attract to the very best staff.

It’s also the case that the quality of electoral services is rarely (or indeed, in my experience, never) the cause of the governing party on a council losing support. Pretty much every other council service, if badly run, does cost the governing party support amongst the public. But electoral services just don’t have that profile. So it’s no wonder that failures in other services get attention (and often remedial action) in a way that electoral services failings don’t.

And then there is the fact that electoral services are usually run as a semi-independent fiefdom. It’s quite right that they should be isolated from the sort of political pressure that councillors can exert on most other areas of council work. This semi-independence however means that when things go wrong, it is easy for electoral services to be much less responsive.

The Electoral Administration Act 2006

How then to tackle the problems of poorly run electoral services in amongst those which are brilliant? With all party support, the law was changed in 2006 so as to give the Electoral Commission the power to set and monitor performance standards for electoral services for most elections. (The powers do not cover Scottish local elections, as they are a devolved matter, nor do they cover Northern Ireland.)

After a period of consulting on what should go in to the standards, the Electoral Commission has just published them. The broad headings are:

Skills and knowledge of the Returning Officer
Of note here is the requirement for the Returning Officer to be aware of the Electoral Commission’s guidance. This should make it easier for candidates or agents dealing with wayward Returning Officers to make them pay attention to the relevant Commission guidance.

Planning and organisation
This includes the requirement to have explicit objectives for the conduct of each election. This will give agents and parties some leverage when dealing with problems such as the late supply of postal voter information, as they can push for deadlines to be introduced to future plans.

Training
An opportunity to get round the frequent problem of those most in need of training not going to any.

Maintaining the integrity of an election
Included in this is the requirement for a written plan of what to do when there are allegations of electoral malpractice. Again, this standard introduces a useful route for pressure to be applied if there are failings. For example, if the council isn’t taking allegations of postal vote fraud seriously, then this new performance standard provides a convenient way in to ensure that the written plan matches that in use in other areas – and is being followed.

Encouraging participation
This refers to letting the public knowing what is going on, rather than to specifically encouraging people to contest elections.

Communication of information to candidates and agents
Last, but by no means least, this standard includes measures such as agreeing to informally check that nomination papers are valid before they are formally submitted. This matters because any errors on formally submitted forms cannot be corrected, whilst informal checking lets them be fixed before formal submission.

In some areas, the standards do not go in to as much detail as I’ve argued for (on behalf of the Liberal Democrats) in meetings with the Electoral Commission, but overall they seem to do a good job of striking a balance between being meaningful and not becoming a piece of centralised micro-management. Success or failure for these standards will, though, depend not only on the Commission and on electoral services staff, but also on councillors of all parties and the degree to which they decide to use them as a useful tool to raise standards.