Town Hall asks why staff failed to deliver voting slips

CAMDEN Council is to launch an internal investigation into how staff bungled the delivery of hundreds of missing polling cards.
The announcement that a probe will begin soon after today’s (Thursday) General Election came as a flood of worried residents rang the Town Hall demanding to know why they had not received polling cards.
Hotspots for missing deliveries include Swiss Cottage, Hampstead and swathes of the Holborn and St Pancras constituency. It also follows a New Journal investigation into the delivery after reporters uncovered how a stack of polling cards had been dumped in Highgate.
Camden has been testing a system in which council staff were offered bonus cash to deliver the cards door-to-door in their spare time. A Town Hall press official said last night (Wednesday) that the system had broken down and between 500 and 1,000 people were affected.
She added: “We have raised cases with the deliverers concerned. There will be an investigation after the election to look into the issue further.”
Although the cards do not need to be produced in order to qualify for the ballot, they do tell voters which polling station they should use. Concerned residents, who have contacted the New Journal about the problem, said they feared their votes could be stolen by ballot cheats if the cards fell into the wrong hands. A council official said registered voters did not need a polling card to vote and urged people to contact the Elections Office at Camden Council on 020 7974 6000 if they were concerned about how to vote.