Groups take action on lost EU election votes

The problems were due to EU citizens in the UK having to fill out an extra form confirming they were not also voting in their countries of origin, and also due to late or non-arrival of Britons’ postal ballots.

Pro-EU group New Europeans is pressing for an official enquiry to be held in the UK and 140,000 have signed a petition in support of this (tinyurl.com/y524f6lk).

The group has also raised the problem with the European Parliament’s constitutional affairs committee which also passed it to the EP’s Brexit Steering Group.

Meanwhile campaigners from British in Europe and the3million raised €40,000 in 24 hours in a crowdfunder (crowdjustice.com/case/deniedmyvote/) to pay for lawyers to consider legal avenues to challenge the way the election was run.

Connexion also heard from scores of readers who did not receive ballots in time.

BiE campaigner Roger Boaden said initially the Electoral Commission said Britons should complain to individual councils if they did not receive ballots but he said mounting evidence shows the issue of ballots coming too late to be returned for the elections (or not at all) has been linked to over 50 different councils.

“Complaining to the council is fine if it’s a one-off but in this case it’s clear something has gone badly wrong,” he said.

New Europeans founder, former Labour MP Roger Casale said they checked with UK councils as to how many forms for EU citizens were sent out and how many came back in time to allow the people to vote.

EU citizens who had not had forms processed were turned away at polling stations.

Return rates ranged from 9% to 35%.

“It’s because they were sent out too late,” he said. “They gave people two weeks but there were two bank holidays and there were school holidays.

A lot used second-class post, and not every council provided Freepost return envelopes and where they did they were second class as well.”

Many EU citizens were also unaware of the need to complete the form, he said.

Mr Casale said the UK government should have planned better, since the possibility of having to hold the elections had been known since at least December 2018 when the UK’s Attorney General raised concerns over the ‘Irish backstop’ arrangements possibly continuing indefinitely.

The comments alarmed MPs thus increasing the chance that the withdrawal agreement would not get through Parliament.

Mr Casale said the UK government had rejected a suggestion from New Europeans that the forms should be available to sign in polling stations to make the process easier.

He said there are estimated to be almost two million EU citizens abroad in the UK who are registered to vote and most forms were not received back. It is therefore likely that more than a million could not vote.

As for the postal ballots for Britons, New Europeans thinks the fact many councils used a low-cost postal service that routed the mail via the Netherlands was part of the reason why many missed out.

“Given that they were starting so late, it exacerbated the problem. Using that service meant it was set up to fail,” Mr Casale said.

He added the chief executive of the electoral commission, the agency overseeing running of elections, wrote in The Guardian they had wanted to prepare earlier but the government stopped them from doing it.

“They were under an EU law obligation to prepare in a timely and adequate way,” Mr Casale said. “We say they systematically and deliberately failed to do that. They can’t get away with saying they didn’t want to have the election. It’s no excuse.”