Election observers say ‘concerningly high’ level of family voting in boothspublished at 23:01 GMT 26 February<\/p>\n
23:01 GMT 26 February<\/p>\n
Joshua Nevett
Political reporter<\/p>\n
An election observer group has claimed its team witnessed “concerningly high levels” of family voting in the Gorton and Denton by-election.<\/p>\n
Family voting is an offence that can be committed when a person casting a ballot in an election is joined in a polling booth by someone who intends to influence how they vote.<\/p>\n
Electoral law protects the secrecy of ballots in polling stations.<\/p>\n
Democracy Volunteers said they attended 22 of the 45 polling stations in the constituency, spending 30 to 45 minutes in each.<\/p>\n
The group said it had seen family voting in 15 of the 22 polling stations observed.<\/p>\n
The group said they observed a sample of 545 individuals casting their vote and saw 32 cases of family voting in total, including nine cases in one polling station.<\/p>\n
John Ault, director of Democracy Volunteers, said: “Today we have seen concerningly high levels of family voting in Gorton and Denton. <\/p>\n
“Based on our assessment of today’s observations, we have seen the highest levels of family voting at any election in our 10-year history of observing elections in the UK.<\/p>\n
“We rarely issue a report on the night of an election, but the data we have collected today on family voting, when compared to other recent by-elections, is extremely high.<\/p>\n
“In the other recent Westminster parliamentary by-election in Runcorn and Helsby we saw family voting in 12% of polling stations, affecting 1% of voters.<\/p>\n
“In Gorton and Denton, we observed family voting in 68% of polling stations, affecting 12% of those voters observed.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Election observers say ‘concerningly high’ level of family voting in boothspublished at 23:01 GMT 26 February 23:01 GMT…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":447684,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-447683","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447683\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/447684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}