261 people turned away from voting in Medway

Plus what does the future look like under our new council?

Editor’s note: We weren’t planning on writing anything further about the fallout from the local elections for the foreseeable future, but we put in a speculative request to Medway Council on voting data and, to our surprise, they gave us the information we asked for. As such, today we’re going to take a look at what that data means, and with the first full Medway Council meeting taking place next week, what our new council will look like.

A polling station in Medway.

261 voters were turned away from Medway’s polling stations in our recent local elections because they lacked the required photo ID to vote, data supplied to Local Authority from Medway Council reveals.

Having crunched the numbers, this equates to 0.45% of all voters who turned out in Medway, and a considerably larger percentage of those who voted in polling stations.

Of those 261, the majority of them (175) did return later in the day with an acceptable form of photo ID.

As such, 86 potential voters in Medway were prevented from taking part in our local elections.

The usual question applies here: Is that a big number?

Somehow it both is and it isn’t.

In the context of Medway’s total electorate of 200,000, it doesn’t sound like very many.

But it is 86 people who would have otherwise voted who were unable to within the new system.

Given the theory behind the rules is to reduce voter fraud, it is worth looking at Medway’s voter fraud data. If there are more than 86 incidents of fraud in each election, surely it’s a price worth paying?

Alas, that isn’t the case though.