Two Labour members in trouble, three Labour councillors happy, one piece of election law looking controversial

The Speaker, Labour MP Michael Martin, is being investigated over the use of Parliamentary expenses to pay for taxi trips for his wife.

Meanwhile, Labour councillor Rob Dix (of South Tyneside council) has been suspended by the Labour Party after being arrested on suspicion of ‘racially aggravated disorder’ after an incident last week whilst he was driving a van that involved a traffic enforcement officer.

But one good piece of news for Labour, albeit in a potentially rather controversial legal ruling – an election petition from the Liberal Democrats in Leicester has been rejected and the election of three Labour candidates upheld.

Potentially controversial because the case hinged on whether or not failing to count half the votes in the ward is reason enough to re-run the election:

The High Court has dismissed a challenge to the legality of a Leicester local election where just less than half of the votes were mistakenly not counted.

John Fitch, the defeated Liberal Democrat candidate for the Abbey ward of Leicester City Council, claimed that because only 4,930 of the 9,099 votes cast in May 2007 were counted before the result was declared, the public would consider it “a sham or travesty of a ballot”.

Returning officer Tom Stephenson and the three successful Labour candidates, Annette Byrne, Colin Marriott and Harshad Dahyabhai Bhavsar, argued that the outcome of the election was unaffected by the missing 45.8% of the votes and that the deficiencies were not enough to render it invalid…

Mrs Justice Cox said there is not the slightest suggestion of fraud in the case, where it was agreed that the uncounted votes were simply overlooked.

She said the law is clear in that the courts should strive to give effect to the will of the electorate and to preserve an election, even if there has been significant breaches of the rules or of the duties of the officials, provided that the outcome has not been affected.

Voters of course have all sorts of reasons for voting, and – for example – many vote for candidates they know aren’t going to win in order to still express a view. Saying that counting all the votes doesn’t really matter is, in the extreme, the same as saying it would be ok to only count the votes for the winning candidates, ignore the votes for any other candidates and declare the winners elected with 100% of the votes.

If that wouldn’t be acceptable, why should it be acceptable to ignore half the votes spread amongst different candidates?