On Wednesday 17 July – two weeks after the people of Putney went to the polls to select their new representative in Parliament – Wandsworth Council announced out the blue that it had failed to count 6,558 votes.
So far it has failed to explain how it managed to lose more than 1 in 10 votes, so Putney.news has dug into the explanations and figures and come up with what we think is the most likely explanation: Wandsworth Council forgot its own town – Wandsworth – exists.
Or, more accurately, that it failed to account for the fact that Wandsworth Town was shifted from the Battersea constituency for this election, and put into Putney.
It was a boundary change announced several years earlier and put in place a few months before the election but it now appears likely that someone on Wandsworth Council used an old version of the spreadsheet it used to tally votes on election night and as a result entirely failed to include its own town into the results.
Vague explanations
The council itself highlighted that the counting error was due to “a spreadsheet issue that resulted in not all the properly counted and allocated votes being included”. In an explanation/apology sent to the agents and parties of those impacted, it said that the “mini-count tables totals were not included in the final result.”
If you take a careful look at the numbers in question, it looks increasingly likely that the issue was that Wandsworth Town simply wasn’t included.
There are seven wards in Putney: East Putney, Roehampton, Southfields, Thamesfield, Wandsworth Town, West Hill and West Putney.
The largest in terms of the number of people on the electoral roll and so registered to vote is East Putney with approximately 12,800 people. Next is Thamesfield with around 12,600 voters; then West Putney with 12,300; West Hill with 11,700; Roehampton with 11,500.
And then there are the two smallest: Southfields with around 9,000 people and finally Wandsworth Town with 8,500, although because of the way the boundaries were drawn, there could also be an additional 800 or so people included in what used to be St Mary’s ward.
If you consider that between 60 and 70 per cent of people voted in this election that were eligible to do so and it seems all too possible that those missing 6,558 votes that were there, were counted on the day, and which were included into the spreadsheet tallies on the night, were missed because… some council officer was running either the 2019 or 2022 version of the spreadsheet.
Lack of accountability and transparency
If that is the case – and it is the most likely explanation – why would Wandsworth Council simply not admit to it? The simple answer is pride. The proper answer is: a lack of accountability; something that has, unfortunately, only grown with the influx of new Labour councillors.
The Labour chair refused to allow the issue to even be discussed at the most recent council meeting. In much the same way it has limited discussion of its housing plans, and finance plans, and pretty much every topic where it worries it could be embarrassed.
Disclaimer: As well as being editor of Putney.news, I was a candidate in the general election, for the Liberal Democrats and was informed about the vote miscount by my agent late Tuesday afternoon. The Council only updated the figures the following day with its brief, and inadequate, explanation.
It’s ridiculous to have a candidate that lost in the election to comment on this story in a manner that appears to be the view of Putney News and not the individual former candidate.
I should have made clear that I am also the editor of Putney.news. The disclaimer has been updated in response to your comment to make that clear. During the election period, any content related to it was edited by a different member of the Putney.news team.