Voters turned away in ID trial areas in English local elections – as it happened

The polls are closed and with that goes this blog. Thanks so much for joining us throughout the day, and thank you for all the comments.

Please join my colleague Andrew Sparrow, who will be blogging the election results as they come in throughout the night.

In the meantime, here’s a quick roundup of today’s action:

• The polls opened this morning in more 4,300 council seats across England in the first big test for the main parties since last year’s general election.
• Voters have been turned away for not having the correct paperwork at at least three of the five areas piloting a controversial trial for mandatory voter ID.
• EU citizens in Tower Hamlets have been wrongly told they could not vote in England’s local elections.
• Police have said a man was reportedly carrying a gun at a polling station in Northern Ireland.

Here’s the fresh blog:

Journalists in Sutton are in for a treat tonight with this “media suite”.

Election day chips, anyone?

EU citizens have been wrongly told they could not vote in England’s local elections, raising fears about future training of public service officials in relation to European nationals’ post-Brexit rights.

Romain Sauron, a French national, said he turned up to vote at the Mile End ward in the London borough of Tower Hamlets to find a “G” alongside his name.

The officials at the polling station told him this marked him out as an EU citizen and meant he could not vote.

“They were quite difficult. I have been here for 13 years and always voted, but I had to haggle with them for about 10 minutes. They checked their leaflet and told me: ‘No, you can’t vote’. I suspect they didn’t read it properly and their training was very poor. They then made a phone call to someone and after 10 minutes they said ‘that’s fine, you can vote’,” Sauron said.

“I was tagged as an EU citizen. I think many people would have walked away, would have felt ashamed.”

Read the full story here:

Controversial voter ID pilot trials are causing a “hugely unnecessary barrier” to people trying to exercise their democratic rights, a Labour MP said.

Ellie Reeves, MP for Lewisham West and Penge, said:

I’ve had reports throughout the day of queues at polling stations. It’s a much longer process than normal. You have people leaving the queues to get to work or pick up kids from school.

I do think it’s put a hugely unnecessary barrier up to people wanting to vote. Compare that to the fact there was only one conviction for electoral fraud based on impersonation in 2017, it just seems like it’s using a sledgehammer to crack a nut in terms of what it’s going to achieve.

Bromley is a fairly affluent, well-settled community. But if you have this in places where the population is much more transient, where there’s a much higher ethnic minority population... it could have an incredibly detrimental effect on people being able to vote if it’s rolled out across the country.

If you’re wondering when the results will start coming in, here’s our definitive guide. It includes all the boroughs to watch out for if you are planning to stay up all night.

Screenshots of an email sent out by Conservative campaign headquarters are being shared on Twitter and nobody is impressed with the contents.

John Stevens from the Daily Mail called it a “new low”.

Others were more blunt.

An EU citizen was almost turned away at a polling station today, according to an email sent to my colleague Lisa O’Carroll. The law is clear that EU citizens living in the UK are eligible to vote in local elections.

Please get in touch if you have had a similar experience today.

Many of you seem to be questioning whether voting offences are a problem that need rectifying. Here’s what CherryHill had to say after reading the Electoral Commission’s electoral fraud analysis from 2017:

CherryHill

03 May 2018 4:25pm

Let's get this in context, there were only 104 cases of alleged electoral fraud involving voting offences in the UK in 2017. Download pdf here:

https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/find-information-by-subject/electoral-fraud/data-and-analysis

Of these, 28 concerned personation (voting as someone else) at a polling station, 22 using a postal vote and 13 using a proxy vote.

In the majority of the 104 cases (74) police took no further action.

In 22 cases this was because it was clear that no offence had been committed, while in four cases the police identified that the alleged offence did not involve electoral fraud. In 23 cases the police found insufficient evidence to conclude their investigation, in 24 cases it was not possible to identify a suspect and in a further 4 cases it was found not to be a RPA offence. In the remaining case the police did not record the reason for no further action.

As someone else has said this is 'fixing' a problem that doesn't exist.

You win some, you lose some...

Many EU citizens will be voting for the last time in Britain today. Some have been tweeting about their experience.

Canvassers are out in force today for the final push to get people to the polling booths.

Momentum, the Labour-supporting grassroots movement, are today holding unseat events in Westminster, Barnet, Wandsworth, Kensington & Chelsea, Swindon and Trafford.

They say thousands of people attended their 15 unseat events over the course of the local election campaign. The biggest was in Wandsworth, which drew 300 people.

Police have said a man was reportedly carrying a gun at a polling station in Northern Ireland. Nobody was threatened at the venue and it is understood detectives are following a definite line of enquiry and trying to locate him.

Voters in West Tyrone have gone to the polls for a Westminster by-election caused by the resignation of former MP Barry McElduff.

Police in Omagh received the report of a man acting suspiciously at a polling station on the Crockanboy Road, Greencastle, just before 1pm today.

Ulster Unionist West Tyrone Westminster candidate Chris Smyth said there was now a strong, armed police presence at the scene.

As a counter-balance to the popular #dogsatpollingstations hashtag, people have been posting about other things at polling stations, including penguins.

Disappointingly, it’s not a real penguin, just this Pingu furniture at the school where the vote is being held. The Electoral Reform Society might surely consider though the suggestion that turn-out could be improved if we got to post our votes into a big fibreglass penguin rather than a boring old ballot box.

The unofficial account of Whitehall’s FCO cat Palmerston clarified why we see dogs at polling stations but not cats.

Political commentator Jane Merrick tried to get the rather more inanimate #plantsatpollingstations going when voting at a rather picturesque polling station, without much success.

On social media, of course, you are never far away from a pun on a popular hashtag.

And this one seems like a straightforward case of entertaining, but ultimately fake, election news.

Bradford Council has apologised after a presiding officer turned away voters for not bringing photo ID to a polling station, despite none being necessary.

Finnegan Pope-Carter, a company director from Shipley, near Bradford, said he arrived at a polling station at 8am and was asked for identification papers.

He was eventually allowed to vote after fetching his driving licence from his car but his wife Chrys Harris, an archaeological geophysicist, was refused multiple times.

“I didn’t have my polling card or a photo ID on me. I told them repeatedly that I did not need them either. They refused and said I did,” she told the Press Association.

Harris said she almost gave up on casting her vote as the polling station clerks assisted other voters. “I stood my ground and finally they rang a superior who said I was allowed a ballot,” she said.

The couple, both 29, described the experience as “very stressful”, but said that Bradford Council had assured them it would not happen again.

A spokesman for Bradford Council said:

We apologise to the very small number of voters concerned who were asked to provide ID to vote in one Shipley polling station today.

We were alerted to the matter early this morning and it was dealt with immediately.

To confirm, there is no requirement for voters to provide ID to cast a vote and a further message has been issued to all polling staff.

Do leave comments about any stories you think we should cover on the blog, or tweet me @nadiakhomami. We’ll keep this rolling until Andrew Sparrow takes over the reins later today for all your local election coverage.

My colleague Peter Walker is in Penge, South East London, where there are more reports of voters without ID being turned away from the polling booth. But I’m glad he’s managed to get his hands on some free cake.

The EU plans to defy Tory Brexiters and retain its offices in London – the former Conservative central office at 32 Smith Square – as an outpost from which to communicate with British citizens after Brexit, leaked documents reveal.

High-profile Brexiters had called last year for the EU to hand back the large red-brick building that was previously Margaret Thatcher’s headquarters and the scene of her general election victories.

The European commission and the European parliament jointly purchased the Westminster building for £20m in 2010 after 50 years of Tory ownership, and renamed it Europe House.

Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, the chairman of the European Research Group, had suggested it would be a “wonderful” gesture of goodwill if, during the negotiations over the UK’s £39bn divorce bill, the building was returned.

But a leaked note on the administrative consequences of Brexit, seen by the Guardian, makes clear that the EU is keen to retain the advantages of the building and its plum position close to the houses of parliament in Westminster.

Klaus Welle, the European parliament’s secretary general, said the EU would need a position from which to champion the interests of its own citizens living in the UK, and to communicate its messages to the British.

Voter ID problems continue to be reported in the trial areas.

Angela Wilkins, leader of the Labour group in Bromley, counted five people being turned away because lack of voter ID at various Bromley polling stations.

Stuart Wilk-Heeg, who is chairman Democratic Audit, says he was offered more cups of tea in the polling stations he visited in Woking than he witnessed voters being turned away.

And there is growing concern about inconsistencies in the rules for the five trial areas and the way they are being applied.

PA has more:

The presiding officer at the polling station in Sydenham Tennis Club, in the Borough of Bromley, said “Only a very small percentage” of voters had forgotten or were unable to provide ID.

The man, who did not wish to be named, said residents had received five pieces of information explaining the change in the rules, including leaflets, a note with their polling cards and a note on the information about recycling and bin collection.

He added: “Voters always have the choice to go home and get some ID.”

Kirsteen Ross, 67, who lives nearby, said she had received at least two leaflets about the change, although no polling cards had been delivered down her street.

“Polling cards are important because they’re a reminder,” she said.

When asked if she thought the scheme was a good idea, she replied: “No, it’s another restriction on civil liberties - it’s just another way to marginalise people who are already marginalised. They might not have any photo ID.”

Labour councillor Tahir Aziz said a man was turned away from voting at a polling station on Walton Road in Woking because his form of ID, a Surrey County Council document with his picture on it, was not accepted.

Aziz said: “This gentleman turned up, showed his ID which included a picture that was clearly him, it was an exact resemblance, but they wouldn’t accept it as it was not on the list of acceptable forms of ID. He was fuming. He was furious. He is a British national and he couldn’t vote. It is having an impact on certain people being disenfranchised by this trial.”

Cat Smith MP, shadow minister for voter engagement, said: “The Government was warned by the Equality and Human Rights Commission and over 40 leading charities and academics the voter ID will have a disproportionate impact on older people, young people, BME communities, trans people and disabled people.

“This was always going to be a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The Electoral Commission found that out of nearly 45 million votes cast in the local and General Election in 2017, there were only 28 cases of alleged voter fraud. That’s less than 0.00007% or one case for every 1.6 million votes cast. And out of those 28 cases, there was only one conviction.

“But instead of listening to the experts and the vast evidence base, the Government decided to implement a mistaken policy with the full knowledge that voters could be disenfranchised. The fact that voters were denied their right to vote is proof that voter ID has no place in our democracy.”

Jakub Krupa, the UK correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, is tracking the fate of 117 Polish candidates standing for election today including 48 for Polish Pride and 28 Polish Tories.

There is a mixed picture on the turn out in Kensignton and Chelsea, writes Goda Naujokaityte. Some polling stations report a “steady” stream of voters others are empty.

Lib Dem leader Vince Cable turned up to vote with his wife Rachel in Twickenham. She had a polling card but he didn’t.

Susan, who lives in Bromley, brought her passport to the polling station this morning:

“There wasn’t a huge amount of publicity about needing to bring ID today but I was fine. I got the impression, though, that there wasn’t a system in place for recording those who turned up without ID and couldn’t vote. You would think with a pilot scheme that kind of information would be recorded.

“There will be some who will go and come back and others who won’t. In that sense, I think the pilot disenfranchises some people – especially the elderly, who may not be able to return, or young people on limited income who don’t have the relevant ID.”

London mayor Sadiq Khan joins in with the dogs-at-polling-stations thing.

As does Green party co-leader Jonathan Bartley.

There’s even a poem.

Goda Naujokaityte, a Lithuania student studying in Nottingham, is sampling the mood in Kensington and Chelsea where anger about the Grenfell Tower fire could hit sitting Conservative councillors.

But the Westfield polling station near Grenfell tower is not busy.

Unlike Theresa May, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, turned up at his local polling station without his polling card or his spouse.

You do need proof of ID to vote in Bromley, Gosport, Swindon, Watford and Woking where controversial pilot schemes are running.

Ministers say the scheme will help combat electoral fraud but critics argue it will suppress turnout.

None of the five English boroughs taking part in the trial has experienced a single instance of polling station impersonation in the past decade.

There have been more complaints and reports of problems about mandatory voter ID being piloting Bromley, Woking, Gosport, Watford and Swindon (see earlier).

Asked to give more details McDonald added:

Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage has prompted outrage from senior Belgium politicians by claiming that Belgium is not a nation.

Speaking in the European Parliament Farage said: “Belgium is not a nation and maybe that’s why you’re happy to sign up to a higher European level.

“You’re losing folks, you’re losing. Brexit is the first brick out of the wall, you’ll learn the lesson, the days of this project are over. “We want to live in nation-states, not false, artificial creations.”

Charles Michel, the Belgian prime minister, responded angrily. The Daily Express quoted him saying: “Mr Philippe Nigel Farage you are slipping into populism and extremism and I don’t think that is worthy of your political party.”

Former Belgian prime minster, Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliament’s chief negotiator on Brexit, said Farage would find out how real Belgium is when England play them in World Cup on 28 June.

Former Labour minister Stephen Timms points out that the government has still to decide on customs arrangements just months before an October deadline for concluding the Brexit negotiations. “How many weeks longer will it be before our government has a clear position on customs?” he asks.

Davis replies: “The clarity of the position on not being a member of the customs union is absolute and has been since the beginning, unlike his own party who have had a number of different positions on this matter. It is incredibly important that we get this right, not just for trade, which is massively important, but also for the extremely sensitive issue of maintaining the peace process in Northern Ireland. And I don’t undertake to put an artificial deadline on something as important as that.”

Meanwhile Brexit secretary David Davis is taking questions in the Commons on exiting the EU.

He is ducking questions on the fraught issue of the customs arrangements, after the government’s inner Brexit cabinet broke up without agreement on Wednesday.

“It is no surprise that it takes some time to nail down this policy,” he said after laughing off a question about whether he would resign over the issue.

HuffPost’s Paul Waugh has more battlegrounds to look out for (in addition to those we mentioned earlier).

Hillingdon has got little coverage but it could turn out to be a surprise Labour win if the party can mobilise its forces and if Tories stay at home. And don’t forget Hillingdon is home to Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge seat.

Outside London, the collapse of UKIP’s vote virtually guarantees both Labour and the Tories will increase theirs overall compared to 2014, when most seats were last fought and when Nigel Farage won the Euro elections on the same day. It will be fascinating to see just which party benefits most from the Kipper collapse. The Tories and Labour alike would be delighted to take Dudley or Walsall from no overall control, as well as Basildon, Thurrock and Cannock Chase. Trafford, an island of blue in a sea of Greater Manchester red, may well see the Tories lose control but it is really difficult for Labour to win seats needed to take it outright. If it does, however, it may come down to the party causing an upset in Altrincham. Yes, that’s the backyard of Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the backbench 1922 committee – the man who knows just how many Tory MPs want to get rid of their leader ...

The current opinion polls putting the parties neck and neck on around 40% confirm the post-UKIP landscape and the Lib Dem squeeze of last year. But real votes in real ballot boxes, not answers to pollsters’ questions, have a recent habit of biting the PM on the backside. And with her Cabinet kicking up rough over Brexit, the last thing she needs is more proof of her electoral toxicity.

There are no elections in Scotland today, but politics and wrangling over Brexit continues ....

Ian Blackford, the Scottish National party’s Westminster leader, has predicted the dispute over Scotland’s new powers after Brexit may end up in the supreme court after the UK and Scottish governments again failed to agree a deal on Wednesday evening.

Scottish and UK ministers met in London for a further round of talks but appeared no closer to settling their dispute over whether the Scottish parliament can block UK-wide policy changes after Brexit.

The Welsh government signed that deal last week, but Nicola Sturgeon’s government insists their agreement gives UK ministers too much authority over devolved government decision making, in breach of the Scotland Act 1998 which introduced devolution.

Sturgeon’s case has been boosted after Scottish Labour and the Scottish Lib Dems backed her stance, despite misgivings over her government’s handling of the dispute.

Blackford told the Scotsman and Herald that the UK’s refusal to agree that Holyrood had to give express consent to any changes to UK-wide policies was “demonstrably unwinding elements of the Scotland Act.” He added: “We are right at the wire”

The supreme court is already due to hear a UK government case over the Scottish parliament’s decision to enact its own rival Brexit legislation in case Scottish ministers refuse to support the EU withdrawal bill at Westminster.

Time is running out for a deal as the House of Lords is due to vote on that bill and the UK government’s compromise offer to the Welsh and Scottish governments next week.

Blackford said the only hope of a deal before then would be if the UK government accepted fresh compromise proposals from Lord Hope, a former Scottish supreme court judge, and Lord Wallace, the former Lib Dem deputy first minister of Scotland.

The Democracy Club has created online tools to help people cast their vote.

Who Can I Vote For tells you who the candidates are in your area and has personal statements from some of them to let you know what they stand for.

It will also tell you where your polling station is, as will Where Do I Vote, which will also give you directions to the polling station.

And Democratic Audit has a Democracy Dashboard on your local council’s current composition.

Theresa May and her husband Philip have cast their votes in Westminster. They came clutching polling cards and left without them. You can still vote without a polling card or ID (except in five areas were trials are taking place). You just need to confirm your name and address.

Dogs versus bikes at polling stations:

Voting is also under way in West Tyrone in a Westminster byelection triggered when the last MP quit amid claims he mocked victims of the Northern Ireland Troubles, PA reports.

Sinn Fein’s Barry McElduff resigned in January, 10 days after a controversy flared when he posted a video of himself with a Kingsmill-branded loaf on his head on the anniversary of the notorious Kingsmill massacre.

He insisted the video was not an intentional reference to the 1976 sectarian murders of 10 Protestant workmen by republican paramilitaries near the Co Armagh village of Kingsmill, but he acknowledged it had caused hurt and offence to victims’ families.

Five candidates are contesting the subsequent byelection.

Sinn Fein’s Orfhlaith Begley is defending a 10,000-plus majority in a seat where the party took just over 50% of votes cast in last year’s general election.

It would be a seismic shock if the abstentionist 26-year-old solicitor, a political newcomer, did not win a seat the republican party has held for 17 years.

Thomas Buchanan is contesting the seat for the Democratic Unionists. The Assembly member - who is the only candidate not aged in his 20s - managed just over half the number of votes notched by Sinn Fein when he ran in last year’s general election.

Assembly member and law graduate Daniel McCrossan, 29, is running for the SDLP while local councillor Chris Smyth is representing the Ulster Unionists. Stephen Donnelly is the Alliance’s Party candidate.

Given the circumstances around McElduff’s departure, issues affecting victims of the Troubles have been a key feature of what has been a relatively low key campaign.

Unsurprisingly Brexit has also featured on the campaign trail in a constituency whose western boundary runs along the Irish border.

Previous local elections show that the main opposition party needs to beat the government party by a substantial margin if it was to have a serious chance of winning the next general election, writes local government expert Tony Travers.

In a blogpost for the LSE he sets out what the benchmarks for success will be for the main parties.

Labour’s performance will give us a powerful clue how well it may do in a 2021 or 2022 general election. Labour is expected to do reasonably well in London this year, particularly after the party’s success in the capital in the 2017 general election, when it won 54.5% of the vote. Labour controlled 20 boroughs after the 2014 elections, with the Conservatives having nine and the Liberal Democrats one. Two were ‘no overall control’. The City of London, with a rather different franchise, has elections on a different cycle.

Barnet, Hillingdon, and Kingston look marginal for the Conservatives, the first two to Labour and Kingston to the Liberal Democrats. Wandsworth would require a larger swing, while in Westminster the Tories have a number of very safe wards which would be hard for Labour to win without a swing of perhaps 10%. Bexley, Bromley, Richmond, and Kensington & Chelsea look safe for the Conservatives, though the political fallout from last June’s Grenfell Tower fire means the politics of Kensington & Chelsea is currently subject to unique pressures.

The Conservatives control only two metropolitan districts: Solihull and Trafford. The former is safe, though latter could produce a Labour win. Labour is two seats short of a majority in Kirklees and three short in Calderdale, both in West Yorkshire. Amber Valley, Swindon and Tamworth are narrowly held by the Conservatives and will be a useful test of how the party is doing outside the capital. Indeed, last year’s snap general election and recent opinion polls suggest that the Tories may win seats in parts of the Midlands and the North, sometimes in places where the party has struggles in recent years.

EU nationals can vote in local elections, but not in UK Parliamentary polls or referendums. In some London boroughs, 10 to 15% of the electorate are likely to be EU citizens. This factor, along with a residual ‘Remain’ overlay, may help the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats in a number of London and city authorities. Of course, in areas with a big ‘Leave’ majority in the EU referendum, particularly in the Midlands and the North, the Conservatives may benefit from a ‘Brexit effect’.

Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May have sent out rival polling day pleas for votes on Twitter.

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Please don’t take photos or videos inside the polling booth as this could be a breach of the law. However before you go in, or after you come out, is great. Though you may want to tell us who you’re voting for, we won’t be able to publish these till after polling closes at 10pm. If there are any issues at polling stations, we’d like to hear about these too.