Author Archives: Tim Hall

Edinburgh Eye asks if the Euro Elections should be declared invalid after reports from across the country of resident non-UK EU citizens, who are entitled to vote in European elections, being denied ballots at polling stations because they had failed to fill in a new form that nobody had told them about.

Whether or not the number of registered voters denied their right to vote is large enough to justify declaring the election invalid: whether or not this turns out to be a huge bureaucratic snafu, someone made the decision to create form UC1: someone made the decision not to bother having it translated into all EU official languages: someone decided not to add a link to UC1 at the About My Vote website or at the online voter registration form: and local authorities all over the country knew that specific registered voters had a new form they had to fill in to allow them to vote at the time they sent out the polling cards, and did nothing to ensure that those voters would know that they had to fill out a new form in order to be able to vote – only to make sure that the polling station workers would prevent them from voting.

I have no idea about the extent of this. It’s always said that any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistiguisable from malice, so this might be a bureacratic screwup, or it could be deliberate US-style voter supression. We have no way of telling. But the people so disenfranchised are the people least likely to vote Conserative or UKIP.

If it turns out the people have been disenfranchesed in sufficient numbers to have compromised the integrity of the election, the election will have to be re-run, as happened in Winchester in 1997. This is probably unlikely, but if it does we will see a excrement to ventilation equipment interface incident of unprecedented proportions.