District Matters

Democratic Services in the District Council

September 2019

People frequently question what the District Council does. In the last Leader's Column, I covered Licensing and Planning; this time it is Democratic Services.

It is responsible, amongst other things, for running all elections in the district. Key to this is an Electors list of roughly 100,000 electors. The Electors list is updated throughout the year with a new fully revised one published at the beginning of December.

Individuals are responsible for ensuring they are registered to vote. However, we have to be sure that the person is ‘real' and is resident at the address shown. Around 10,000 new voter registrations happen each year by people changing their address or young people reaching voting age. Most occur during the autumn arising from information gathered by the enquiry forms sent to around 60,000 households. Over a third of the 60,000 households need a reminder sent. That totals 80,000 pieces of mail.

There are UK parliamentary, European parliamentary, County Council, District Council and town or parish council elections. In addition there are also Police and Crime Commissioner elections and national and local neighbourhood planning referendums, of which 15 have been held so far. Throughout the district there are 13 County Divisions and 36 District Wards. There are four town councils in the district: Stratford-upon-Avon, Shipston-on-Stour, Southam and Alcester. There are 79 parish councils of similar status to town councils, although without a mayor. In total this results in 110 different areas needing a total of 572 councillors to be elected.

For the District Council elections alone, there were 142 candidates nominated, with each nomination form needing 10 signatures. Each nomination form must be submitted, checked and verified, so 1,420 signatures needed to be checked (and every signature must be different). Not a small task. There were 32 nominations for Stratford Town Council.

Ideally, preparing for an election begins 12 months in advance with the booking of premises (over 100 may be required). Some 300 polling station staff are needed on the day and another 80 for the count. Some elections can be called at very short notice. The General Election in 2017 allowed just over seven weeks to organise staff allocations, premises, dealing with political parties, nomination papers, the despatch of nearly 20,000 postal votes and 100,000 poll cards, staff training, ballot paper production, the preparation of 140 ballot boxes with specific contents for particular areas, and all arrangements for vote counting.

Some 18,000 people are registered for postal votes. Everyone with a postal vote is sent a form to complete and a ballot paper. There are procedures in place to verify every returned postal vote for inclusion in the count. This involves checking personal identifiers such as date of birth and signature.

The European election earlier this year took everyone by surprise. The local elections were held on 2 May and the European poll just three weeks later. Never before have two major polls been held so close together, which presented complications such as people turning up at polling stations with the wrong poll cards and, in some cases, at the wrong polling station if a change of premises had been needed. Furthermore, the franchises for the two elections were not identical. Some people could only vote on 2 May and some only on 23 May.

I hope that this has given an insight into the amount of work that goes in to ensuring our democracy functions effectively. So, next time you exercise your vote you can appreciate all the ‘behind the scenes' effort.