Postal votes

On Tuesday, the Council began the process of verifying all the postal votes that have been returned.

This year, the Government introduced extra security for postal votes. What are called "personal identifiers" - signature and date of birth - need to be completed on both the original application and the postal vote declaration form.

For a postal vote to be validly cast, the declaration form has to be returned alongside the ballot papers, and the signature and date of birth on this form have to match those on the original application.

With over 30,000 postal voters in Wandsworth checking them all is a huge task. Some authorities have responded by only checking a sample of postal votes - say one in every fifty. Here in Wandsworth, every single one is being checked: something I fully support because there has been a lot of mostly inaccurate and damaging stuff written about the security of postal voting and it is important to restore public confidence in our voting system.

From reports I've received, as many as 7% of the postal votes cast have been rejected this election. That's an incredibly high number - but before the cynics rush to write yet more nonsense about postal vote fraud, my team was observing this process on Tuesday and the vast majority of rejected votes were because people had made innocent mistakes:

• Writing the date they filled in the postal vote form rather than their date of birth;
• Using the American date system where days go where months should be;
• Because signatures were different enough for there to be a legitimate question - no more than that - as to whether the person who applied for a postal vote had been the one voting;
• And in a handful of cases, it looked likely that a family member had signed the form for an elderly or disabled relative who struggled to write - but these too had to be rejected.

After the election I think the council should look at explaining even more clearly just how critical it is that this information be filled in carefully and accurately - and the consequence that their vote will not get counted if they get it wrong must be hammered home. And the Electoral Commission should review whether the law can be relaxed slightly so that what are obviously just mistakes with the date of birth field, described above, don't cost someone their vote.

But postal voting has to be secure - full stop - and that means rejecting ballots that aren't apparently cast by the people they were sent to. So I congratulate the Labour Government for implementing this tough, secure system and the Council for implementing it so rigorously.