Electoral Commission says returning officers improving but doubts remain over the data

The elections watchdog, the Electoral Commission, has been mildly trumpeting the results of the latest survey of electoral registration work carried out across Great Britain by local councils.

The Electoral Commission’s news release says,

Electoral registration service improving but more work needed
Electoral registration services in Great Britain are improving ahead of the forthcoming elections and referendum on Thursday 5 May, but some can still do better, says a report by the Electoral Commission, the independent elections watchdog.

The Commission has published its annual assessment of performance by Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) across Great Britain. The report assesses how effectively EROs are delivering their duty to maintain complete and accurate electoral registers…

The Commission’s report shows that the vast majority of EROs have improved their services to voters over the three years since the Electoral Commission introduced performance standards.

However, the system for assessing electoral registration services is heavily dependent on self-classification by council staff and research last year by the Electoral Commission itself showed one third of Acting Returning Officers were wrongly assessing their own performance. It is therefore questionable how much faith should be placed in these latest figures which again depend on council staff classifying their own work correctly.

However, the responsibility for having such questionable data does not rest solely with the Commission itself. Despite the survey finding that as many as a third of checks were finding errors, I’ve not been able to find any Parliamentarians or journalists who have taken up this issue (though do let me know if I’ve missed an example). Nor has anyone taken up the case where marked registers lost were lost and votes counted up wrongly, but the Returning Officer was still judged to have met performance standards.

The Commission at least has done the research that raises questions. If no-one else wants to pursue those questions, even though the Commission is regularly the subject of media stories and is answerable to Parliament, then that is a more widely shared failing.