The Great Hackney Swindle – Voting Irregularities At Hackney Town Hall?

Andrew Boff

Employees at Hackney council have been telling callers that there is no Conservative candidate, standing for Mayor of Hackney in the coming elections, this according to the Hackney Citizen and Andrew Boff.

The Conservative Mayoral candidates attention, was brought to this issue by ‘concerned residents’.  Only last month, Boff was told his election address would not be included, in a Mayoral election booklet, Hackney Council prints and sends out to households in the borough. It was rejected because of a sentence included in his election address -  “The Mayor and his Cabinet pay themselves £335,000 a year”.

Andrew Boffs’ latest claim is another in what seems  to be one long “he say she say” between Boff, Jules Pipes  pee ons minions, Hackney council clueless front office staff and incompetence of the electoral services department,  and on the surface you have to wonder if Boff, is reading a little too much into the incompetence of these people or if there is more to these seemingly questionable ‘mistakes’,  by Jules Pipe and his band of merry men on Mare Street.

I’m going to play devils advocate for a moment so don’t shoot me.  Boff has throughout his campaign had a cozy relationship with the Citizen and the site has been his mouth piece, feeding them tidbits of all his wranglings with the council, which makes one  wonder if there isn’t another side to the story.

Take the alleged emails from “concerned Hackney residents” to Andrew Boff, The Citizen has posted on their site.  Without seeing the email headers, they could be,  well…made up?  Although having produced a recording of the conversation he [Boff] had with the not well informed Hackney council call centre staff, who told him there wasn’t a Conservative mayoral candidate, there probably is some truth to it.

My question is,  can Pipe and those in charge of  electoral and democratic services in Hackney Council be stupid enough to blatantly attempt to mislead voters or is someone having an unnecessary hissy fit?

Talking of hissy fits, they play both ways. This is what Luke Akehurst Labour councillor in Hackney and an agent for Mayor Jules Pipe, had to say in response to Mr Boffs complaints and those of his supporters last month:

“Mr Boff has demonstrated he isn’t competent to be Mayor because he isn’t even able to submit a manifesto in the required format.

Your activists must privately be incredibly angry with your candidate for messing this up.

If Mr Boff’s message is so important he can do what political parties have always done and get volunteers to deliver it door-to-door.

But then maybe there aren’t enough Tories in Hackney to do that”.

No different from a little boy in the school play ground eh?

An official from Hackney has since issued a comment on the Hackney Citizen website.