Guidance for Returning Officers administering Local Government Elections in England

As postal ballot packs must be issued as soon as practicable to electors, there may be circumstances where a person you have already sent a postal ballot paper to subsequently applies to the ERO to cancel their postal vote, or make any changes to their absent voting arrangements, within time for the changes to be able to take effect at the election(s).

However, a postal ballot paper that has already been returned to the RO cannot be cancelled.1  Our ERO guidance contains further information on changing or cancelling postal votes at an election.

If you are not also the ERO, you need to arrange how you will liaise with them, so that any changes to absent voting arrangements can be communicated to you in a timely manner and you know which ballot papers need to be cancelled.

Upon notification you must immediately cancel any postal ballot paper that has been issued to such an elector or postal proxy, and add the details of the cancelled ballot paper to the list kept for that purpose (see our guidance on record keeping for cancelled postal votes).2

You should consider how to manage the process of removal of those packs from any postal vote batches not yet despatched from your printer.

Where the change to the absent voting arrangements relates only to the address to which the ballot paper should be sent, you must, in addition to cancelling the original postal ballot paper issue a replacement postal ballot pack to the new address.3

You must also cancel any lost or spoilt postal ballot papers you have had to replace (see our guidance on re-issuing spoilt postal votes and lost/not received postal votes).4

You need to maintain an audit trail of all the cancellations, including how your software system can be used to log all cancellations to enable you to produce the required list of cancelled postal ballot papers (see our guidance on record keeping for cancelled ballot papers) and identify any postal ballot papers that have been cancelled but have been returned and so need to be retrieved.