BNP quick off the mark with new lies

Sonia Gable | Sunday, 4 May 2008 Source: Searchlight

The British National Party is claiming that 400,000 ballot papers in the London election were officially declared “spoilt” because of “massive and organised ballot box tampering”.

According to a statement on the BNP website, this went unreported by the media “because the most likely target of said suspected vote tampering or ‘ballot box stuffing’, would be the BNP”.

Overlooking the fact that “stuffing” ballot boxes with spoilt papers would be rather pointless, the reason the media did not report this is because it is simply not true.

The number of spoilt papers in the London mayoral and Assembly elections was somewhat higher than in other British elections, as it was last time round in 2004, probably because of the more complicated voting system. But the figures are far below the BNP’s claim.

Each voter had three ballot papers covering the constituency vote, the London-wide list and the election for mayor. In the constituency poll there were 47,799 spoilt papers, less than 2% of the total votes cast. The London-wide list results recorded 41,489 spoilt papers, amounting to 1.69% of the total votes. And in the mayoral election 41,032 papers (1.67%) were rejected in the count of first choice votes.

That adds up to 130,290, a long way short of 400,000.

There is, however, a figure of over 400,000 in the results tables, namely the 412,054 papers that were rejected in the count of voters’ second choice for mayor. Of these, 407,840 were not counted simply because the voter had not made a second choice.

That’s hardly sinister, though you would not expect the conspiracy nuts in the BNP to see that. Deliberate lie or wilful stupidity, it is a fitting start to Richard Barnbrook’s term of office as a London Assembly member.