Archive for Election law
How many people are on the electoral register who shouldn’t be?
The Daily Express reports: [Conservative MP for Enfield North] Nick de Bois cross-checked the names of constituents seeking his help to stay in the UK and found 21 out of a sample 100 had signed up for voting rights. The Tory backbencher is calling on ministers to tighten registration rules, claiming it is harder to get [...]
Individual electoral registration: my letter to The Independent
From today’s paper: You are right to highlight the extraordinarily long time it is taking to introduce individual electoral registration in the UK* (leading article, 3 April). However, it is a little unfair to blame the Electoral Commission for that. They have been calling for its introduction for many years, and it was the slowness [...]
Police investigate Labour in Leeds over fake poll card allegations
The Leeds Labour Party is being investigated by the police for over claims it has broken the law against issuing imitation poll cards.
Police arrest BNP candidate for Mayor of Liverpool
The BNP candidate standing for elected mayor of Liverpool has been arrested by Merseyside Police.
Police called in over electoral fraud allegations in Tower Hamlets
Scotland Yard has been asked by the Electoral Commission to investigate “unprecedented” evidence of voter fraud ahead of next week’s polling for London Mayor.
Our broken electoral timetable – or why Andrew Neil is too late
We are left in a world that is like trying to run an election by regulating hansom cabs and telegrams. They are of a long-gone age and elections needs to be run in a way that reflects the modern world. So too with postal votes: polling day is no longer polling day for increasing numbers of people and the way we run elections should react to that.
Individual electoral registration: this is how government is meant to work
Via a slightly odd story in the Daily Telegraph comes the news that Nick Clegg is pushing for the current legal penalties for not returning electoral registration forms to be continued when individual electoral registration is introduced.
Home Office decides against national spending limits for Police and Crime Commissioner elections
The controversy over the Government’s view that there should be no freepost election addresses for Police and Crime Commissioner elections has caught the headlines so far, but there is something far worse in the details of the draft legislation. Put simply: having considered having national expenditure limits for the elections, the Conservative ministers in the [...]
Electoral Commission points finger at media on people’s concerns over electoral fraud
Despite the relatively low level of allegations, 36% of people believe electoral fraud is a ‘very big’ or ‘fairly big’ problem. These people, however, were more likely to have seen stories in the media about fraud...
Theresa May, I salute your sense of irony
At the end of this answer, the Home Secretary could have said “by ringing up”, “by writing in” or some such words. But no, she went for “from the internet access”, resulting in a superbly ironic self-referential loop. Ma’am, I salute you. Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab): Why has the Home Secretary ruled out a free-post [...]
