Firstly, it is a missing 6,300 voters in East Devon and the worse council of all (Taunton Deane, see below) managed to lose 8,800 voters.
This comes from a very interesting table on page 10 of the Electoral Commission’s report of June 2014
which identifies East Devon District Council as one of the worse 17 councils in the country for not dealing with the transition from the old system of voter registration to the new one.
The table shows the 10 local authorities with the largest decrease in elecorate. Taunton Deane was worst – they managed to lose 8.8% of the electorate between 2012 and 2014 followed by Allerdale (7.9%), Maidstone (7.7%), Northampton (7.4%), Isles of Scilly UA (6.5%), Newham (6.4%), East Devon (6.3%), Wellingborough (6.0%), Tonbridge and Malling (5.9%) and Hastings( 5.8%).
East Devon Watch 
I am all for pointing out the shortcomings of our local council, but in the interests of fairness I think I should point out that East Devon lost “only” 6.3% of voters and not 63% as suggested by the missing decimal point. 🙂
More seriously, according to a new web page on the EDDC web site, this doesn’t seem to bother our ERO, Mark Williams (also Chief Executive of EDDC) who explains it away as an expected consequence of a national switch over to a new electoral registration system. However, FoI requests to several neighbouring councils show that they haven’t had a dip in voting numbers like this, so it doesn’t look to me like something to be expected from the change over, calling into question the “explanation”, or should that be “excuse”, provided by Mark Williams.
LikeLike
The missing decimal point was corrected almost immediately, but well spotted! Yes, the reason for the drop is an excuose – no house to house canvassing was done as in the majority of areas because “EDDC chose not to” – but who chose and why and might it have affected the outcome of the Euro elections and might it have affected any by-elections?
LikeLike