Voting in UK Elections We have Been Allowed a Postal Vote

We have received e-mails from Stroud Council saying that an Election Support Officer has allowed our postal votes.


Does this woman not know that we are entitled to these votes, despite the Council doing their best to stop us from voting!


This attitude is just what puts people off from voting. Tin pot dictators in Council offices and crazy schemes when all we want is electronic voting.


Has anyone else had this same wording?

I have asked Elizabeth, from the Electoral Commission, see we are now on first name terms, if this wording is mandatory, or if it is part of this tin pot dictator malaise.

Jane, I have been through it before, but briefly. We moved here from Wales where we were for five years because we had jobs there. So that was my last electoral registration. I had an issue I took to the MP and got back a sniffy reply. I wrote back and then got it full broadside that having left the constituency to live in another country the MP did not see why he should spend time on what I was asking. I assumed it was written by a staff member and signed by the MP, so wrote back a letter that I registered to the MP and got back a reply in which he assured me that the letter I had received had been dictated then signed by him and that he had enough to do without being pestered (my own word, but what he meant) by people living outside the UK.

So I joined the campaign for electoral rights in my country of residence and wrote to the electoral returns office there to ask to be removed from the register. That took a number of elections for which I received materials before I actually got a letter telling me I my request (it was a demand) had been acknowledged and that I was off.

OK Jane, it may appear different to what you are saying but appears to be part and parcel of the same malaise. Out of sight, preferably out of mind I think, ignored as far as possible irrespective of what legislation otherwise says. We are, in my view, an unwanted burden on them that they treat with utter contempt which the late and apparently still not all arrived postal votes for the election this month epitomise. I suspect, albeit I am no longer directly affected, that it will get worse given some of the people in office this time round - not that the alternative would have been any better.

It is scandalous.

It is a case of out of sight out of mind, or mind over matter and we do matter!!

No I haven’t but our tin pot council has still not sent us the application for postal vote forms (I applied in August 2014 and February 2015). They say they must be lost in the post but this is the fourth time it’s happened. I told the Returning Officer that as a public servant his and his department’s service was rubbish as all they want to do is cover each other’s backs with poor excuses.