Birmingham City Council leader, Mike Whitby, has reportedly threatened to privatise election services after two ballot boxes went missing during last month’s election.
Cllr Whitby told the Birmingham Mail newspaper he was thinking of outsourcing the election service after the boxes went missing on election day for two-and-a-half hours, before being found with the seals broken.
He told reporters he had wanted a complete review of the elections office, and the service was ‘sloppy, inefficient and littered with inconsistency’.
Cllr Whitby has written to both the Association of Electoral Administrators and the Electoral Matters Forum about the matter. Council chief executive, Stephen Hughes, said he was confident last month’s election results were correct.
‘Lessons can, and will, be learned, but it must be remembered that the procedures we adopt to get ballot boxes from polling stations to count centres are exactly the same as those used across the entire country, and a major change would need to come from national government,’ said Mr Hughes. If the Electoral Matters Forum wants to review how we do things in Birmingham, it has our full support.’
