Or are they so sure they will be re-elected they aren’t bothering much?
We haven’t seen any pictures of Hugo Swire and Paul Diviani together either …
Daily Archives: 26 Apr 2015
You want to know what the Conservatives have planned for East Devon? You have to give them your email address and postcode AND opt in to receive propaganda!
Hugo Swire has a link on Twitter so you can find out what his party has planned for our area:
https://www.conservatives.com/yourarea.aspx
Unfortunately it forces you to put your postcode and email address – you can’t search for “East Devon” or “Sidmouth” anonymously so the data collected knows where you live within a few yards AND it signs you up to receive Conservative Party propaganda and fundraising emails until you opt out!
We chose not to use it! East Devon Watch likes its privacy!
Electoral Returning Officer budget for East Devon and performance standards required
The job is SEPARATE to any other post and each Returning Officer receives a fee for doing the job (often in excess of £20,000 per election) and a budget. It seems Mr Williams had a budget of more than £121,000 in 2010 to run this procedure:
“The specified services are—
(a)conducting the election;
(b)discharging the returning officer’s duties at the election; and
(c)making arrangements for the election.”
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2010/830/made
He got it wrong in 2011 too:
Here are the Performance Standards for Returning Officers – standard 1 on page 12 appears to have been breached:
Click to access Part-A-Returning-Officer-role-and-responsibilities.pdf
The voting instruction mega-cock- up – it IS only East Devon Constituency and Mark Williams!
The explanation:
“All the District Elections and Town/Parish Council elections are administered by the Returning Officer for the relevant Constituency up until after the Constituency votes have been separated from the District and Town/Parish votes and the number of votes cast and spoilt papers, etc. has been reconciled with the Polling Station or postal voting accounts. At that point, the District and Town/Council votes are re-sealed into ballot boxes and transported to the relevant District Council on Friday 8th May for counting by the Returning Officer (Mark Williams) for the East Devon District Council.
So the postal voting instructions for East Devon Constituency were prepared by Mark Williams. The postal voting instructions for Tiverton and Honiton were prepared by Mid Devon Returning Officer and the postal voting instructions for Central Devon Constituency were prepared by West Devon Returning Officer.
So, it seems only Mark Williams (who has been the Returning Officer for East Devon for at least 9 years and maybe longer) made mistakes in the postal voting instructions. Therefore, the correction letter is only going to the multi-seat wards within the East Devon Constituency.
Mr Williams has presumably been the Returning Officer since he started at East Devon District Council – we are not sure how long he has been CEO and Returning Officer but we have traced it back to at least 2006!
The monumental cock-up: Urgent instructions for people who received the wrong postal voting information
From a correspondent:
“This is news hot from the East Devon election workers at the Knowle (today Sunday!).
They say they have had dozens of phone calls about the discrepancy between the “Instructions for voting by post” (i.e. vote ONCE only on Green ballot paper) and the Green ballot paper itself (where the instruction is to vote for the number of votes according to the number of seats).
The election worker at the Knowle is contacting all the people who left messages about the discrepancy in the instructions, to say the following action is being taken urgently:
1. A letter is being sent to all postal voters in the East Devon Constituency (NOT the Tiverton and Honiton or the Central Devon Constituencies).
2. The letter will explain that votes should be cast according to the instructions on the Green ballot paper, not according to the written “Instructions for voting by post”
3. If a person has already voted not in accordance with the instructions on the Green ballot paper, they should call Knowle and request a new ballot paper to be issued, which will be substituted for their vote already returned.”
Will the head of the instigator of this cock-up have to roll? It belongs to CEO of East Devon District Council (and Returning Officer) Mark Williams, so who knows? He got off scot-free after his appearance before the Parliamentary Commission on Voter Engagement last December where he was heavily criticised and singled out in their report for failing to do enough to register missing voters, so maybe the Teflon coating will remain – especially if the “same olds” remain in power at EDDC.
What will now happen if some people who had followed the instructions on the WHITE (wrong) paper do not cast new votes on the GREEN (correct) paper and the seat can only be decided by a handful of votes fewer than the number of incorrect postal votes for that ward?
NB: seeking clarification as to why workers state remediation letters are going out only to the “East Devon Constituency” as East Devon District Council covers THREE Parliamentary constituencies – East Devon (currently Swire), Tiverton and Honiton (currently Parish) and Mid-Devon (currently Stride). It seems unlikely that wrong instructions went out only to the “East Devon constituency” when the district elections are not governed by Parliamentary Constituency boundaries but by Local Authority boundaries which are very different.
Now, if incorrect voting instructions are confined only to the East Devon Parliamentary Constituency, that would need some explaining as separate instructions would have been produced for different areas of East Devon!
Who shapes our future?
Anyone who’s been to the new town of Cranbrook lately, will be interested in this link: http://futuresforumvgs.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/where-we-live-now-new-town-home-town.html
Was it Churchill who once said, we shape our buildings and our buildings shape us…
Fourteen East Devon Alliance candidates now have You Tube videos
Four new candidate videos have been uploaded to YouTube and can be viewed from the following candidate pages:
Mark Daugherty – Exmouth Brixington
Val Ranger – Newton Poppleford and Harpford
Matt Coppell – Ottery Rural
Steve Horner – Yarty
This brings the number of videos available to watch up to 14, the other candidates being:
Robert Crick – Exmouth Littleham
Les Cotton – Budleigh
Megan Armstrong – Exmouth Halsdon
Rob Longhurst – Woodbury and Lympstone
Marianne Rixson – Sidmouth Sidford
Geoff Jung – Raleigh
Dawn Manley – Sidmouth Sidford
Cathy Gardner – Sidmouth Town
Martin Shaw – Seaton
Ben Ingham – Woodbury and Lympstone
Read more at: http://www.eastdevonalliance.org.uk/change-log/20150425/new-candidate-videos-available/
East Devon Watch 