I received some interesting post through the mailbox today.  And by interesting I mean, interesting if you’re in anyway enthused about politics and the upcoming referendum for Alternative Vote and/or marketing in general.

On 5^th May in the UK, the British people will be voting on whether to adopt the Alternative Vote (AV) system, over the current ‘first past the post’.  There are a lot of arguments as to whether this is a good or bad idea, and I’m currently undecided.  I feel I should admit that now, because otherwise this seems very anti-Yes to AV.

The letter I received through the post looking official, was marked ‘Private and confidential, Important papers enclosed’, addressed directly to me and I could spot a little bit of purple on the letter.  The purple is relevant because the Yes to AV camp has cleverly chosen a purple hue similar to that used by the census, which is doing the rounds at the same-ish time.

Direct mail is an underutilised marketing technique and sending something addressed to the occupant is more likely to get read that just a leaflet with the post.  Fair enough, good marketing plan.  Encouraging people to vote, particularly by reminding people of the postal vote is a nice touch, although the Vote Yes poster was a little much in my opinion.

But what strikes me a little underhand is the way that this has been carried out.  Nothing in this was private or confidential, and the similarities in colour to the census could alarm people, particularly as the fines for not handing in your census are £1,000 (admittedly for all of a minute before they opened it, but still).  Maybe that’s what they were going for, if so it’s somewhat in bad taste, particularly given all the stick the No to AV camp received for scare tactics.  Although they’re not quite suggesting voting no would deprive babies or anything, it doesn’t strike me as the best idea, if only as it could anger people who were worried about the census.  And no one wants to worry about private and confidential information, when it’s just marketing.

Oh and I’m off to a debate tomorrow about AV, so maybe I’ll make up my mind…

A candidate in the constituency I live is running both for MP of the constituency as well as local councillor in a ward nearby.  Whilst I know this is possible, although I question how one person can do both effectively, I was more shocked to hear one of the candidate’s supporters suggest (how true this is I don’t know) in the event the candidate won both elections they would resign the councillor position.  This sounded like a great waste to me and I needed to understand the implications – could this waste taxpayers money in the event of a by-election or votes if the candidate with the second highest votes was subsequently elected?

My first stop was Twitter, that being said it wasn’t greatly helpful.  So I calledBirmingham City Council’s election line.  The person on the phone asked me who I was and I couldn’t help but answer “a concerned resident of Birmingham” – it had to be done.  According to him at least, I couldn’t be given the information unless I was a candidate.  So I emailed.  A day and a half later I had no response, so I called again.  I was once again told this wasn’t the sort of thing they dealt with as they weren’t in the Back Office (?! I’ve no idea what that means).  I kicked up a bit of a fuss and got put through to the mysterious Back Office where a nice person consulted a colleague and said they thought it would result in a by-election, but to call the Electoral Commission.

So I did.

And spoke to a lovely person who was the most helpful person I spoke to during all this.  They mentioned a few things and then said they’d look into it and email me back. Sadly I have a difficult email address so I didn’t get it until I emailed in and checked the spelling of my Irish-variant surname.  At the same time I got a response from Birmingham City Council.

The email from Birmingham City Council confirmed that if a successful candidate resigned “This would therefore trigger a by election [sic]. There is no provision for the candidate with the second highest number of votes to be elected.”

This was backed up by the email from the person at the Electoral Commission who said the failure to sign the declaration of acceptance would, according to the Local Government Act 1972, be dealt with in the usual way according to rule 89.  This, after reading it, backs up the comment from Birmingham City Council, thankfully.  You can read it here, if you’d like.

Oh and the cost of a by-election.  According to the person at Birmingham City Council; “As for the cost of a by election this would be approximately £20,000.”

NB: I’ve contact the candidate in question a couple of times to check whether they are intending to resign from the councillor position if elected to both, but as of yet I have had no response.

*This was originally posted on my old blog BeanHeartBatman*