Last weeks' (24th May) KTimes carried two stories about potential legal challenges to the results of the Brent Council elections. I don’t know what is happening with the query about the election of Cllr Pawan Gupta in Dudden Hill but I do have some news on the challenge to the count in Queen’s Park.
I understand that Brent Council have written to all the candidates in the Queen’s Park ward acknowledging the concern and the reasoning behind the querry raised by Shahrar Ali....
What news have I on the ‘missing votes’ in Queen’s Park? Well, I know that all the candidates have been written to by Shahrar Ali who has appraised them of his calculations and his investigations with Brent Council. I imagine that the next steps will be to petition the Returning Officer through the High Court as the Officer does not have the power to choose to recount the ballot. More info as and when I’ve digested the papers from the Law Courts…...
The suggestion that a number of votes went uncounted at the local election is based on what was witnessed by Shahrar Ali on the night. There is no way that Shahrar could have seen all the ballot papers in for the Queen’s Park ward, but he did witness the first sort and count of the block votes and also the count of the ‘splits’ and the paper with unallocated votes....