💾 Archived View for danq.me › posts › council-disenfranchisement captured on 2024-08-31 at 13:22:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-10)
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2024-04-13
Like much of the UK, there are local elections where I live next month. After coming home from a week of Three Rings volunteering I found my poll card on the doormat. Can you spot the bleeding-obvious mistake?
My poll card, from West Oxfordshire District Council (my name is seriously mis-spelled on it!)
This'll be the first election for which I've needed to bring photographic ID to the polling station. That shouldn't be a problem: I have a passport and driving license and whatnot.
But just to be absolutely certain, I had the local council - the same people who issued me the polling card! - supply me with a voter authority certificate:
So now I'm in a pickle. West Oxfordshire District Council are asking me to produce photo ID in the wrong name when I turn up at a polling station next month. It doesn't even match the name on the photo ID that they themselves issued me.
This would be less-infuriating were it not for the fact that they had my name wrong in the same way on an electoral roll form they sent me in August 2022 [1] and when I contacted them to have them fix it, they promised that the underlying problem was solved [2] so this very thing wouldn't happen. And yet here we are.
Fake sign: "Polling station for Dan Q's imaginary friends only"
Hopefully they'll be able to fix their records promptly or else I guess I'll have to apply for a proxy vote, to allow the ballot of my imaginary friend "Dan Que" to be cast by me, Dan Q, instead.
And if that isn't the most bizarre form of election fraud you've ever heard of, I don't know what is.
[1] They'd had my name right before August 2022, including on previous poll cards; I can only assume that some human operator "corrected" it to the wrong thing at some point.
[2] They didn't fix the problem immediately in August 2022. Initially, they demanded that I produce proof of my change of name from "Dan Que" (which has, of course, never been my name!) to "Dan Q", and only later backed down and admitted that they'd made a mistake and would correct the PII they were holding about me.
