Tameside Council Denies Voters the Right to Vote
The socialist borough of Tameside, in Greater Manchester, run by the wholly inept Cllr. Roy [I might step down] Oldham from his ivory tower in Ashton-Under-Lyne, have orchestrated a super wheeze to keep people from voting at all on 4th June 2009.
There are many people in the borough who for various reasons are unable to vote in person. Those people would choose either a proxy to vote for them or vote by post.
The polling cards for residents of Hyde [of Dr. Shipman fame] in Tameside arrived – wait for it – four days after the deadline to register for a postal vote! Sneaky huh?
Voters, who were unavailable to vote on polling day in Tameside, were jamming the phone lines at Ashton-Under-Lyne town hall demanding not to be deprived of their vote. Staff told them their only option was to vote “by proxy” in the election. That is, to nominate another person to vote on their behalf.
The inept town hall staff at Tameside then did not rush to post out the proxy forms. The postal delivery service in Hyde is spasmodic at best, and mail tends to arrive typically every few days in mid afternoon rather than daily in the morning.
By the time the forms arrived (without a prepaid envelope), there was only two days before the deadline for proxy forms to be received back at Tameside Council. Your author duly posted a proxy form first class – from the sorting office in Hamnett Street. It only had to travel a few miles across town, so one would hope it might have made that journey in two days.
Polling day arrives, and your author, armed with a polling card and a photocopy of the proxy form heads to the polling station. Guess what? I am not on the list to vote as a proxy. I explained the situation about the deadlines to the staff, and what had happened. One of them decided she must call Tameside council and check it out.
I get wheeled outside and a phone passed to me with a council person on the other end of the phone. It went like this:
“You cannot vote in the election, you didn’t send the proxy form in”
“How did you establish that I didn’t send it in?”
“Well, we haven’t received it”
“That’s not quite the same thing is it? Most likely you have received it and have lost it.”
“Well, we have no record of it”
“I have a copy of it in my hand”
“You should have sent it in to us, not taken it to the polling station”
“I did send it into you. As stated already; I have merely a copy of it”
“Well we haven’t got it”
“Is that my fault?”
“So you can’t vote!”
“Is this democracy in action?”
Click – line goes dead.
It seems that this is an example of democracy in action at Tameside council. They know very well that as a rotten Labour council, representative of the ever more corrupt Labour party, nobody would be likely to vote for their candidate anyway. Why should they bother to help anyone to vote by proxy or post? A vote thwarted in this underhand way by the inept Tameside council is most likely a vote that would not be cast in their favour anyway. Why should they care? They could have thwarted hundreds of votes in a similar way. I would suggest that this is akin to vote rigging.
Tameside council are fast enough to collect the council tax – which has gone up 3.5% this year – but only empty the bins once a fortnight and have the shame of the failing Tameside Hospital (the local hospital with one of the highest mortality rates in the country) on their turf.
How many more people were denied the right to vote in Tameside today?
As a person who was intending to vote by proxy on behalf of another today, but thwarted, I can state for the record that I was instructed to place that vote for the British National Party.
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