Last week Labour Run Wandsworth Borough Council hit national headlines for all the wrong reasons when over 6500 votes in the General Election went missing.
On election night, a set of results was declared suggesting a total of 42,737 votes had been cast in the Putney constituency on a turnout of 59%. Unexpectedly revised figures issued last week, however, show that an additional 6,558 votes failed to be correctly tallied on the evening, with the true turnout being 68%. This means that roughly 13.3% of votes cast during the General Election in Putney were unaccounted for almost two weeks after polls closed.
The results the public heard on the night were not how they voted. Subsequently, the public, Parliament, the media, other bodies and researchers were all given the wrong official results.
Cllr Peter Graham, Local Tooting Councillor for Wandsworth Common & Earlsfield, said:
It’s extremely concerning that the Council knew the official declaration was wrong, failed to tell anyone and then hid a correction on its website.
"Trust in the electoral process matters…This shouldn’t have been able to happen.
The official declaration of results had been silently changed on the Council's website without any acknowledgement or public statement explaining how the disparity occurred.
While it does not appear that the failure to include all of the votes cast in the declared totals would have altered the outcome of this election, this could easily have been the case had the election been close.
CEO Resigns / Silence from Labour
Not even a day later the CEO of Wandsworth Borough Council resigned, citing ‘personal reasons’. Despite this extremely public fiasco the Labour leadership of Wandsworth Borough Council have chosen to remain silent.
Despite the national coverage and the Local Conservatives expressing their concerns at this “alarming” error on the part of Wandsworth Council, the Labour Administration chose to shut down any level of scrutiny or answers to questions last week.
Astonishingly, the Labour Administration have yet to even mention this fiasco happening.
This is unprecedented and it is clear that standards are slipping at Wandsworth Borough Council.
