This isn't a conspiracy or a mistake - it's a very smart, simple way to prevent A LOT of people accidentally disenfranchising themselves. I once asked a Council officer about it, and they said: 'The most common way postal votes used to get excluded was people would write... 🧵
'... that day's date instead of their date of birth. And their ballot would be automatically thrown out. So now we give them the first two numbers of their year of birth and far fewer people make that mistake.'
@LeeDavidEvansUK So are they sending different ones to younger people?
The form could just generally be a lot better in terms of formatting to make it clear what's being asked for, the boxes are absolutely massive, the signature box just seems way too big for what it's asking for, and the text on the left appears to just be a continuation of the paragraphs above.
@LeeDavidEvansUK I postal voted for a couple of elections but cancelled it the moment I got rejected for a bad signature one time. I felt quite disenfranchised (literally and figuratively)
@LeeDavidEvansUK The boxes are all very large. Did it not occur to them to put the important words in a much larger font, maybe above the boxes, and not surrounded by a load of other text? "MY DATE OF BIRTH" --- "MY SIGNATURE" --- This fix is not going to last for long.
@LeeDavidEvansUK Maybe if they can't fill in a form correctly which clearly says "My Date of Birth is ---->" it's best that they don't vote anyway.
@LeeDavidEvansUK It's all very confusing with the various tear off bits & multiple envelopes etc. Probably best not to post it back on the same day as my promised bowel screening kit arrives, courtesy of the NHS🤔 Don't want to spoil my ballot!🤣
@LeeDavidEvansUK I would have thought the date of voting was more important than dob (which the electoral register obviously already knows), so can see how this mistake happens tbh
@LeeDavidEvansUK I did find it odd when I saw it on my ballot- but then I also know so many people loose their vote due to putting todays date in that box. Makes a lot of sense to me, made me think again to make sure I was putting the right number in.