ElectionLeaflets.org

Minutes from an Executive Team meeting of the £25million/year Electoral Commission disclosed by Freedom of Information request (link) show that, when offered a range of five options for monitoring compliance with laws concerning political election leaflets, the board chose to pursue Option 3 known as “Enhanced desk-based research”, over Option 4 which involved any form of partnership with The Straight Choice website.

Chief Executive Peter Wardle was skeptical about the added value of a project where citizens scanned political leaflets live onto the internet to its compliance objectives, and was not sure that the benefits outweighed the risks.

Enhanced desk-based research involves hiring a maximum of four agency staff in April and allocating them to marginal high risk constituencies at the budgeted cost of £12,182 in addition to normal staff sitting at their desks and reading random political twitter feeds and other sites on the internet.

Julian Todd of The Straight Choice said, “These sniveling cheapskates in the Electoral Commission will probably spend part of their day at their desks scanning through our website for material they should have helped us collect in the first place.”

Obscure records show that the Electoral Commission has in the past stumped up £125,586 in a grant to encourage adults with learning disabilities to vote (link).

Although numerous laws apply to what can and cannot appear on political leaflets, the Electoral Commission’s statutory duty to monitor compliance only applies to referendum materials (link), while other bodies — such as the police — have the responsibility for the investigation and prosecution of allegations relating to election materials.

Notwithstanding this setback, The Straight Choice website will carry on with direct donations from Julian Todd and other volunteers who are able to see the point.

Julian hereby challenges Peter Wardle on his £120k salary plus pensions allowance, or anyone else from the gong-encrusted board of commissioners and deputy commissioners to match his substantial £3k cash donation so far, if they know what’s good for democracy.

Having done an awful lot of desk-work this morning, Julian can disclose that Wardle’s standard biography included in brochures for various shindigs attended (link), which contains the sentence “He has also worked on the first major outsourcing of government IT services” is probably referring to his time at the Inland Revenue in the 1990s(link) during the first in a long line of obscenely catastrophic IT outsourcing projects to the “world class player” formally known as EDS (link). No wonder he leaves that crucial detail out of his CV.

Monitoring of the procurements of the Electoral Commission should be undertaken for signs of the common Business Management graduate intuition of how to manage IT work in the public sector.

Still, it could be worse.

A lot, lot worse.

They could have spent the last 5 years trying to give us electronic voting.