Council incompetence left up to 1,300 voters unable to vote in General Election, damning report finds

Damning: the Electoral Commission report found multiple failings

Hackney Council failed to register 1,300 eligible residents and left them potentially unable to vote at the General Election, an Electoral Commission report has found.

The damning report, released this week, says the council bungled the rollout of  a new voter registration system.

It slams Hackney for falling way short of the Commission’s electoral performance standards, and provides figures showing the borough to be the worst performing local authority in the UK.

The new system of Individual Electoral Registration requires every person to register to vote individually. Under the previous system, one person in a household could register everybody else living at that address.

According to the Commission’s report, 1,300 residents were not included on the electoral register, despite the fact they had made valid applications.

Voter registration data during the transition between the two systems in 2015 was found to be unreliable, with the report stating: “This lack of confidence in the data being correct led to a lack of understanding of both the scope and scale of the challenges and what progress had been made in response to these.”

The report also noted that Hackney had delayed the implementation of a new system for updating the electoral register by matching register entries with other data the local authority holds on residents.

Hackney was furthermore identified as the only local authority in the country to have failed to submit its electoral registration data to the Electoral Commission by the December 2015 deadline.

These failings led to around 43,000 entries, or 23 per cent of names on last year’s electoral register, not being confirmed on the new 2016 register.

Summing up the consequences of these problems, the report states: “As the issues encountered affected the ability of people to successfully register in advance of a set of scheduled polls and demonstrated an inability to successfully monitor the progress of the delivery of the implementation plan, we believe that the impact was significant.”

The Electoral Returning Officer Tim Shields admitted there had been problems implementing the new Individual Electoral Registration system in the run-up to the General Election last May. “On the day, I worked closely with the Electoral Commission to ensure those eligible were able to vote and we’ve apologised to those who were affected,” Mr Shields said.

“Straight after the elections, I ordered a strategic review of the service and the system we use. The Electoral Commission is satisfied that we have made significant progress since and I am confident that we have taken the appropriate steps to reduce the risk of this happening again.

“Unfortunately we were unable to extract the data requested by the Electoral Commission from our election system. We’re continuing to work with the third party provider to try to retrieve this. We’re now using a new system and we were able to provide the Electoral Commission with our most recent voter numbers (167,132).”

This article was amended at 14:40 on Monday 29 February 2016. The original article stated Hackney Council denied 1,300 residents the chance to cast their vote in the General Election.

In fact, whilst the voters were not added to the register, there is a ‘clerical errors’ provision which allows electors to still vote, even if they have been left off the register.

In its report the Electoral Commission states that it “provided the ERO for Hackney with advice about whether these electors could be added to the register under legal provisions which allow EROs to correct clerical errors. Hackney took steps to issue a communication alerting electors to the problem and to provide polling stations with lists of the affected electors so that they would be able to vote if they attended their polling station. (our bold type)” – Ed.