‘Shambles’ as poll cards are dumped on estate

A HUGE pile of election polling cards has been found dumped on a Highgate estate.
Camden Council officials last night (Wednesday) thanked the New Journal for intervening after reporters safely returned more than 250 ditched polling cards to election managers.
The rescue followed a tip-off from a resident at Makepeace Mansions in Makepeace Avenue, Holly Lodge where the cards were discovered in an easily accessible communal area.
The polling cards – to be used as a quick form of identification when polling stations open for the General Election on May 5 – had been meant for addresses elsewhere in the Hampstead and Highgate constituency. They were supposed to have been hand-delivered by council staff.
Town Hall bosses offered large sections of the council’s workforce the chance to earn bonus cash by helping out with the massive door-to-door distribution.
Volunteers were paid 18p for every poll card delivered – a rate nearly four times than that paid by newspapers and advertisers who deliver door-to-door across London, and roughly equal to twenty puonds an hour.
Camden insists the trial system provides enough security to reassure voters.
But the polling cards rescued by the New Journal could easily have fallen into the hands of fraudsters, who would then have been able to cheat the system by posing as voters on election day with a relatively small chance of detection.
Shocked residents affected by the botched delivery yesterday (Wednesday) described the council’s performance as worse than “shambolic”.
Martin Morton, former leader of the Conservative Party in Camden, was among those whose polling cards went missing.
He said: “People could have pretended to be me and I’m not very happy about that. It’s a shambles. It means there has clearly been inadequate surveillance of the people delivering and I hope they will not get paid. To say this is shambolic is putting it mildly.”
Streets hit by the delivery shambles include Hillway, Highgate High Street and large swathes of the Holly Lodge estate.
Pippa Rothenberg, secretary of Holly Lodge Estate Committee, who lives in Hillway, added: “It’s quite an extraordinary state of affairs, not a very good sign. They (the distributor) have taken one look at the hill and decided they didn’t want to walk up it.
“I’m shocked. You would have thought that they would have put together a system that would work.”
Other residents whose polling cards went astray include Timothy Straker, the QC who acts for Hampstead Heath guardians the Corporation of London, and Benjamin Schott, author of quirky Christmas stocking-filler Schott’s Miscellany.
The poll card shambles comes just days after prominent Camden politicians and worried residents voiced concerns over the potential for postal votes to be rigged.
With the election just two weeks away, Camden Council is now ready to investigate the loss of any further poll cards and has asked worried residents to ring the Town Hall if they have not received their cards within the next seven days.
Officials, however, claimed yesterday that the poll cards problem uncovered by the New Journal was currently being regarded as an isolated case.
Richard Lefley, elections manager for Camden Council, who accepted the missing forms from reporters, said: “We’d like to thank the CNJ for helping us to get these poll cards back.
“We are using council officers to hand-deliver poll cards this year because of the high number of complaints in previous years about their non-arrival when using Royal Mail.
“Camden Council is trialing this system, which should reduce complaints because it enables us to monitor staff making deliveries more closely and hold them accountable.
“We try to use council staff or canvassers who already know the areas. They sign a confirmation slip after they have made the delivery. However, no system is foolproof and there is always room for human error, especially when thousands of cards are delivered in a short space of time.”