Guidance for Returning Officers administering a Senedd election

You must determine the validity of a nomination form, home address form and consent to nomination as soon as is practicable after formal delivery.1 This enables any parties or individual candidates whose nominations have been deemed invalid to submit new papers before the close of nomination.

If a completed set of nomination papers have not been delivered by the close of nomination for an individual candidate, the nomination has not been made which means that you cannot rule the nomination valid or invalid.2
    
For party list nominations, if the nomination form and home address forms for each candidate have not been delivered by the close of nomination the party list nomination has not been made which means that you cannot rule the nomination of the party valid or invalid.
 
Additionally as each candidate on the party list is responsible for the submission of their own consent to nomination, where any consent to nomination has not been delivered by the close of nominations for one or more of the candidates on the list, those candidates’ nomination(s) have not been made which means that you cannot rule their nomination(s) valid or invalid.

If you have not received the required deposit by the deadline for the submission of nomination papers, the nomination for the party or individual candidate as appropriate has not been made which means that you cannot rule the nomination valid or invalid.
 
In any of the cases where any candidate or party has not been made there is then no need to make a formal determination, and their name(s) should not appear on the statement of parties and persons nominated (as appropriate).

We have produced a checklist to assist you with processing nomination forms.
  
You can find the nomination checklist in the nominations section of our resource page.

Accepting nominations at face value

You must not:

• undertake any investigation or research, your duty does not go beyond seeing that a nomination form and home address form is correct on face value3

You should not:

• investigate whether a name given on a nomination form is genuine

You should:

• disregard any personal knowledge you may already have
• determine nominations on the basis of the form itself

Sham nominations

In very limited circumstances, there is an exception, based on case law, to the principle of accepting nomination papers at face value. You may come across a situation where a candidate's nomination is clearly a sham - for example, if an obviously fictitious name or address has been given such as Mickey Mouse of Disney Land. In such a case that candidate’s particulars are not as required by law, that candidate’s nomination must be held to be invalid on those grounds.4 In the case of a party list candidate this would not affect the validity of the rest of the candidates on the party list.

In addition, the case law also provides that candidates who give particulars that are obscene, racist or an incitement to crime deliver particulars that are not as required by law. This is because they contravene the law and/or will inevitably involve the RO in a breach of the law.
 
When considering the name, the primary consideration should be whether the name that has been provided on the nomination form appears to be obviously fictitious on the face of the paper.
 
If the name does not appear to be a genuine name and instead appears to be a statement or slogan, for example, you may consider that it is obviously fictitious.
 
Any conclusion would be supported by considering the wider context. For example, does the name appear to be a political slogan made in response to topical political events, rather than the genuine name of a real person?
 
A court would likely in those circumstances conclude that such names are obviously fictitious and that the nomination form should be rejected.