house of lords official report - United Kingdom Parliament

1147 Political Parties and Elections Bill [LORDS] Political Parties and Elections Bill 1148
those in hard-copy form. When armed services personnel
are deployed overseas, that should be part of the
checks made under the standard operating procedures.
That would seem a sensible way forward. The Minister
has undertaken to make representations to the Ministry
of Defence. We are encouraged by that and I am
grateful. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Lord Greaves moved Amendment No. 84:
84: After Clause 24, insert the following new Clause—
“Rejected postal votes
(1) Schedule 1 to the 1983 Act (parliamentary elections rules)
is amended as follows.
(2) After rule 31A (return of postal ballot papers) there is
inserted—
“Postal ballot papers not counted
(1) Where a postal vote has been returned but not counted
because the personal identifiers—
(a) are absent,
(b) are incomplete, or
(c) do not match the personal identifiers provided with the
application for a postal vote,
the returning officer must record this information on a separate
list (the list of postal votes returned but not counted) in addition
to making the entry on the marked list.
(2) The list of postal votes returned but not counted is a
relevant election document for the purposes of section 42 of the
Electoral Administration Act 2006.
(3) The returning officer shall write to each elector whose
returned postal vote has not been counted for a reason listed in
paragraph (1) to inform them of the circumstances in which their
vote has not been counted.”.”
The noble Lord said: My Lords, as I am going to
refer to some of the local information on Pendle about
which the noble Lord, Lord Bates, was asking, I
should declare an interest in that I was the Liberal
Democrat agent for most of the county council candidates
in the recent elections and attended counts on both
Friday morning and Sunday evening. The matter raised
by the amendment was one I referred to briefly in
Committee on a different amendment, but I have now
brought it back following the experience in the recent
elections as there is a serious problem that needs to be
tackled. I am moving the amendment in the hope that
it is helpful.
The amendment requires the returning officer to do
two things. First, the returning officer must keep a
separate list of those postal votes that have been
returned, or where envelopes have been returned but
where the votes have not been counted owing to a
failure of the personal identifier system. In other
words, the personal identifiers are absent, incomplete,
or do not match the information that the council holds
on file as a result of the application for a postal vote. I
should say that I am particularly grateful to Gillian
Hartley, who is the Pendle Council elections officer,
for helping me to understand how the system works
and what happens, and for providing me with the
information that I shall offer a little later.
Secondly, the amendment requires the returning
officer to write individually to each of the electors
whose votes have not been counted because of a
mismatch in or absence of the personal identifiers. At
the moment, that does not happen. At the moment,
two lists are produced after the election, which are
available to candidates and political parties under the
approved conditions.
The first is the marked register, which shows the
people who have turned up at polling stations and
been given a ballot paper—and, presumably voted.
The second is the postal voters list, which provides a
list of those postal votes which have been returned at
that election. The postal voters list includes all the
envelopes that have been returned, because the list is
compiled from information on the envelopes before
they are opened and before the votes are opened, so it
includes those which are not subsequently counted.
The provision of that list, which did not happen before
the passing of the Electoral Administration Act 2006,
was partly a result of discussion that took place in
your Lordships’ House on previous legislation, when
it became clear that that list was required. Before then,
the only list required was of the postal votes issued,
not those returned.
The current system is that if you send a postal vote
back, the envelope is returned, received and opened.
Inside that envelope, there should be a smaller envelope,
sealed up, that includes the ballot paper and the piece
of paper that contains the personal identifier. When
those personal identifiers are checked—I have to say
that Pendle, like most of the councils in the north-west,
did a 100 per cent check of postal votes and the
returning officer decided to do it last year in view of
the controversy over previous postal votes in Pendle—the
sheet of personal identifiers comes in, it is fed into the
machine that checks them and that computer-type
machine checks whether the information about date of
birth and signature match the information that the
council holds on its records. If the machine thinks that
they match, it goes through. If the machine thinks that
they do not match, or it is not sure, it is spewed out
and on the screen, on the monitor, is displayed the
information that the council holds on its records. That
is then compared visually and manually by counting
staff with the paper that has come in, and they decide
whether, yes, they match sufficiently or no, they do
not. That is how it actually works.
We discussed this in Grand Committee, I brought
evidence from two county councils by-elections this
spring in Nelson, which is part of Pendle, in one of
which the number of rejected votes, because of a
mismatch or absence of identifiers, was more than
5 per cent of the total, and in the other, which was a
substantially Asian ward, more than 10 per cent. This
year, in the six county divisions within Pendle, which
make up Pendle and the area that counted for the
European elections, 485 returned envelopes were
rejected—in other words, the ballot paper was not
looked at and not counted—for failure to provide a
matching identifier. In some cases, the identifiers were
absent; in some cases, only one of them was there; in
most cases, they did not match. This was approximately
4.5 per cent of the total, on a return of postal votes of
about 70 per cent.
In the most Asian division—I do not have the exact
figure, but I think the Asian electorate is about 45 per
cent of the total—the return of postal votes was
81.7 per cent, and 11.6 per cent of the envelopes