Council admits to election blunders
Returning officer says 'some counters had poor numeracy skills'
THE full catalogue of errors that may have led to the wrong candidate being elected in the West Berkshire Council May 7 election was revealed this week, following a comprehensive investigation into what went wrong.
As previously reported, Liberal Democrat Lee Dillon was elected to the Thatcham North district seat after polling 2,160 votes, but it emerged soon after that a mistake may have been made, with more votes declared than cast.
The chief executive of West Berkshire Council and returning officer, Nick Carter, admitted that a combination of the counters’ poor numeracy skills, exhaustion and poor training led to the blunder.
He told councillors at an Overview and Scrutiny Management Commission meeting on Tuesday: “It was human error. Clearly the result that I declared was not right.
“The supervisor on the table did not count the votes right. If the ICT had been operational it would’ve been picked up but the human view was that it was OK.
“It wasn’t until I had declared the result that it became clear it wasn’t arithmetically correct.
“It was an arithmetic error on one of the counting tables that led to the error.”
A full report submitted to councillors on the circumstances explained that on the day some key staff members were exhausted and had been on duty for more than 36 hours without sleep.
The ICT failing was down to the Xpress software system, which aids the counting, not being fully operational.
Other reasons for the failure were blamed on poor staff training – particularly on count supervisors who “were not well suited to the role” and insufficient supervision of the counting tables by the core elections staff.
Speaking at the meeting, Virginia Von Celsing (Con, Compton) also pointed the finger at counting staff and said: “I saw a woman in front of me who counted the same number of papers probably 10 times and it looked like she couldn’t count.”
The elections team admitted that they did not give any training to counting staff and Nick Carter added: “We had some who quite clearly couldn’t count.
“We are very dependent on our own staff but in this election we had to get others. They all had some form of online training and we assume that they can count but there have been instances where people come in and think of it as a social outing and obviously can’t count.”
Dave Goff (Con, Clay Hill) said at the meeting he found the result for Thatcham North “frustrating” and noted that now “nothing could be done other than a high court challenge”.
Other failings for the elections were also identified, including inadequate signage at some polling stations and not enough screens being provided due to delivery problems.
Nick Carter said of the missing screens: “The company that we employed didn’t deliver enough polling screens so I went into polling stations where some people had to improvise. I would give 10 out of 10 for effort but I think that some were horrified.
“They said that we felt we should have had more screens. I was a bit surprised that they hadn’t rung up but they had clearly just taken the initiative.”
The chairwoman of the committee Emma Webster (Con, Birch Copse) ended the discussion by congratulating the election team for their overall performance considering that three elections were held simultaneously.
