"No Official Mark"

[overthehill]

Lots of boroughs i.e. Islington seem to have declared a small number of votes as disallowed due to 'no official mark'. This mark used to be stamped by polling clerks, but is now pre-printed. Is this a mistake, or something else, i.e. a printing error or someone ripping off the corner of their ballot paper. 

[owainsutton]

Any chance that it's a London thing?

That huge ballot will have surely increased the cases of it being ripped inadvertently, especially as people were opening postal ones.

[johnloony]

I was watching quite a lot of the adjudications of doubtful papers in Croydon, and there were a few where the top of the ballot paper had frayed inside the postal vote envelope to the extent that the official mark was not properly intact. A few ballot papers had the bottom half (with the independent candidates) cut off, and were valid because the mark was still intact. But there were a few where the top had been cut off. One ballot paper was disallowed because only the Brexit Party line had been included (with an X in the box).

But it has occurred to me that some of the spoilt votes might have been allocated into the wrong category. When the R.O. adjudicated a paper as spoilt, she stamped it with a standard stamp, on which another staff member ticked the appropriate box. It's possible that a paper which was "unmarked or void for uncertainty" could have been subconsciously ticked as "want of official mark" instead, without anybody noticing. There were hundreds of ballot papers being adjudicated in a steady stream for hours on end, so it could easily happen.