Wrong polling station

It has just come to light that some people were directed to the wrong polling station when I and a number of supporters delivered leaflets with a "substitute poll card" to over 3,076 properties in the ward.

For the majority of people this would not have caused any great concern but for some with limited mobility this would have been awkward and of course I am sorry this happened.

We already know that many people were completely unaware of the election due to certain members of the council voting not to issue poll cards (something I will fight to prevent happening in the future) and so as the election came close I took the decision to issue a substitute poll card on the back of my second leaflet.

Sadly due to a very confusing setup and limited information available some residents in the same street were actually allocated to different stations and this we did not take in to account.

Had I not have taken this decision and unintentionally inconvenienced a few (but I agree that was a few too many) many more people would have missed out on their right to vote. The pink poll notices that appeared on lamp posts were certainly bright but they only gave details of where to vote by voter number which was of little use as only a small number of people would ever know their voter registration number.

It was here that the mistake was made as we separated the different leaflets by polling district G1 - G5 without noticing that certain voters in the district had to vote somewhere else.