Election: big story is appalling organisation

Just as the Commonwealth offends the British establishment by sending a team to monitor the conduct of the UK 2010 election – we prove how right they were.

There are likely to be well found legal objections to the obstruction to democracy effected by many of the cockups the night has seen.

Here’s a sample:

• Polling stations running out of ballot papers – yet postal voting has been higher than ever before.
• Voters queuing to get in to polling stations to vote and, at the 10.00pm deadline, being allowed in at some stations and shut out in others. In one case 500 voters are said to have been turned away. (One such polling station where voters were turned away was Liberal Democrat Leader, Nick Clegg’s conatituency of Sheffied Hallam.)
• Voters registered to vote and turning up to do so, Voting cards in hand – and finding that the electoral roll lists had not been updated and so not being allowed to vote.

Every incident on this list is utterly unacceptable and is characteristic of the chaos in uncertain new democracies.

If this had been Zimbabwe, what would we have been saying?

‘Broken Britain’ begins to look less like a party political slogan than an understatement of reality.