Agenda and minutes

In opening the meeting, the Chair stated that he wished to place on record his thanks to all of the former Members of the Committee for the contributions they had made to the work of the Committee, namely former Councillor James Hart and Councillors John McHale and Charlie Hogarth.  The Chair also welcomed Councillors David Hughes, Sue McGuinness (who had submitted apologies for this meeting) and Tina Reid as new Members of the Committee.

There were no declarations reported at the meeting.

RESOLVED that the minutes of the Elections and Democratic Structures Committee held on 21st March, 2017 be approved as a correct record and signed by the Chair.

The Committee considered a report which gave details of the results of the combined all-out Local Government and Mayoral Elections held on Thursday 4^th May 2017 and the UK Parliamentary General Election held on Thursday 8^th June 2017.

The Electoral Services Manager introduced the report by confirming that this was the first time that all-out Council Elections and the Mayoral Election had been held together and this would be the pattern going forward from this point on.  She then summarised the salient points in relation to the outcomes of each election, including the number of electors who had cast their votes on polling day, the number of electors who had voted by post, the number of postal vote packs rejected due to the personal identifiers not matching, and the total turnout in percentages.  Detailed summaries of the results of the Local, Mayoral and General Elections were provided in the appendices to the report.  In referring to the use of counting sheets at the counts, the Electoral Services Manager advised that further information, including copies of the spreadsheets used at the counts, could be provided to Members upon request.

During subsequent discussion, the Officers answered questions and Members made comments/observations on a range of issues including the following:-

• In response to a question by Councillor David Hughes, the Officers clarified the methods used for deciding whether to accept or reject postal votes where the personal identifiers did not appear to match.  With regard to rejected postal votes, the Assistant Director of Legal and Democratic Services confirmed that all of the affected individuals would be written to and informed of the error/discrepancy which had led to their postal vote being rejected, and they would be able to come and inspect the papers if they so wished.

• The Officers explained that if a voter returned their postal vote papers in a plain envelope instead of the official envelope provided in the postal vote pack, this would still be picked up and processed in the same way as all the other postal votes.

• Arising from discussion on the increasing use of social media, the Assistant Director of Legal and Democratic Services advised that any complaints received in relation to the content of election campaign literature circulated by candidates or comments/posts made on social media had been passed to the election single point of contact (SPOC) Police Officer and the Electoral Commission.

• Members acknowledged the significant amount of work that had been caused for the Elections Team by the increase in registration, postal vote and proxy applications in the run up to the General Election, including a substantial number of duplicate registrations received from electors re-registering when they were already registered.  It was noted that the elections team had to carry out the time consuming task of manually checking the duplicate registrations, and this problem would persist until electors were able to go online themselves in order to check whether they were already registered or not.  It was also noted that the Elections  ...  view the full minutes text for item 4.