Rob Horgan
BRITISH expats living around the world are complaining that they were unable to cast their vote in yesterday’s UK General Election.
Some Britons living abroad have complained that their postal votes arrived too late for them to return in time to be counted.
All votes are still to come in but David Cameron is set for another term in Downing Street after the Conservative party reached the magic 323 seats needed.
Most of the affected were in the Middle East but as expat blogger Brian Cave explains, a number of European expats were also affected by the delayed postal system.
“There is prima facie evidence accumulating that large numbers of citizens abroad have not received any ballot papers for the election,” he said.
“The electoral registration officers in various constituencies have not sent out the papers in time so that they can be returned in good time before May 7.”
A total of 113,742 people registered to vote via proxy or postal. The number that actually did remains unknown for now.
By law they are only allowed to send out votes so many days beforehand not allowing enough time to get the votes back.
Our voting papers came but not in time to return them. luckily we were flying back so posted them in the UK.
Question Time last night pointed out how much influence the Murdoch Empire has on British politics but denied by Francis Maude. The system has serious flaws when UKIP gets nearly 4 million votes for 1 seat, SNP’s 56 seats for something like 26 thousand votes per seat. Polls were totally wrong, I assume Pollsters get paid irrespective of total inaccuracy. The Yahoo bias was phenomenal on election day, almost all the pro UKIP posts were deleted time and again. The topic would normally have had 1000’s of posts but ended up with 84 or so.
How does all this compare with Spanish voting and/or rigging?
Who are people complaining to? I am planning to write to the Electoral Commission. If we all do they might change the system.
We registered in time, andcreceived an acknowledgement that our applications were being processed, but at the time of writing (May 9) still nothing.
I’m really angry and am going to complain, but for goodness’ sake, it ought to be possible to implement electronic voting in the 21st century. It’s no more susceptible to fraud than the case of someone else going to the polling station and giving your name: and would be much easier to secure via encrypted passwords.
Actually there has been huge frauds in postal voting. Does Tower Hamlets ring a bell? No surprise that many marginal seats had the highest amounts of postal votes. Lots of other allegations too.
As for your papers not arriving, you do realise that there has been a postal strike in Madrid. One friend’s post took 10 days from Madrid last week.