Lessons learnt from 2023 ‘all out’ elections in Wolverhampton to be presented to city council bosses
Lessons learnt from this year’s ‘all out’ local elections in Wolverhampton are to be presented to city council bosses, with a view to helping fine-tune any areas requiring improvement for future ballots.
Local authority officers have conducted an evaluation exercise to pinpoint what worked well during the May 4 elections, and which processes need to be addressed differently next time.
This year’s elections saw all 60 Wolverhampton Council seats up for grabs and the introduction of new ward boundaries. As a result of the new boundaries there was also a significant number of changes to polling station venues.
A report to the council’s governance and ethics committee said: “These were also the first elections to be held since the introduction of voter ID and the new accessibility requirements for polling stations. Due to the complexity of these elections, a decision was taken by the returning officer to count the votes the next day, Friday May 5.
“There were 185,122 electors eligible to vote at this election and a total of 48,206 votes were cast. The overall turnout was 26 per cent. There were 34,061 postal voters, which is 18 per cent of the electorate. 19,063 postal ballot papers were included in the count, which equates to 40 per cent of the total votes.
“There were 168 electors who were initially turned away on voter ID grounds – 113 of these returned with an acceptable form of ID. There were 55 electors who were refused a ballot paper on voter ID grounds.
“There were 65 proxy voters and one emergency proxy appointed. There were 126 polling stations. A total of 15 schools were used as polling stations, which is a reduction of 9 from the 24 used at the 2022 local elections. There were 6 temporary polling stations, an increase of 3 since the 2022 local elections,” said the report.
“A total of 840 roles were recruited to work on the elections across polling stations, the count and postal vote opening. There were 153 candidates and 29 election agents.
“Wolverhampton received £113, 342 Election Act grant funding. A total of 813 Voter Authority Certificates were issued by the deadline of April 25. A total of 222 surveys were completed from key stakeholders. Election Board and key internal services also contributed to evaluation feedback meetings.
“Overall, the local election was considered to have been conducted well. The two key areas for improvement identified in the evaluation of the 2022 May elections relating to postal vote opening time and the challenge of recruiting presiding officers were very much improved for this election. Overall, there was very positive feedback received on the implementation of the new Election Act measures – voter ID and accessibility,” added the report.
“The evaluation focused on eight key areas to summarise the key successes and areas for improvement: candidates and agents, staffing and training, postal vote opening, election printing, polling stations, verification and count, voter ID and accessibility.”
A full breakdown of the evaluation will be presented to the governance and ethics committee next Thursday.
