North Lincolnshire Council: Lost votes found in wheelie bins 'human error not fraud'

Staff tiredness in the hot counting space at The Pods in Scunthorpe "significantly contributed" to the failure to count the missing ballots

More than 800 voting slips went missing in a local election because of human error, tiredness and a misplaced wheelie bin, a report has said.

The postal ballots for the Broughton and Scawby ward disappeared during North Lincolnshire Council's May count.

They were found in a wheelie bin soon after, a report by the Association of Electoral Administrators (AEA) said.

It meant the result was declared and legally-binding with the 864 postal ballots still uncounted.

Afterwards, an independent electoral review was commissioned from the AEA, which said that once the bin of postal votes was discovered to be missing, all steps then taken were "legally correct and well-considered".

The returning officer also took "sensible" actions "in a measured manner", the report said, but it was not until the Monday after the Friday count that it was confirmed the votes in the bin had not been counted, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.

'Human error, not fraud'

The AEA report said all steps taken were "legally correct and well-considered and it was clear that human error, rather than electoral fraud, caused the issue.

"There was no one single point of failure, rather several issues that independently and collectively contributed to the outcomes," the AEA said.

Staff tiredness in the hot counting space at The Pods in Scunthorpe also "significantly contributed" to the failure to count the 864 missing postal ballots.

Another factor was that the count supervisor arrived after the verification process for the postal votes because she was also in charge of another polling station.

Finally, the report said, the wheelie bin where ballots were placed after verification went missing - because a larger ward being counted on the next table encroached and the Broughton and Scawby ward bin was moved "without the count supervisor's knowledge".

Two Conservatives were elected in the ward following the election on 4 May, with about 525 votes each, and Labour came second with their two candidates gaining 367 and 355 votes.