Can the next General Election be delayed beyond Jan 2025?

Quartz said:
What do you think will happen when a considerable part of the population - for whatever reason - cannot vote on the day? Surely we must have some sort of procedure, some arcane law, to cope with this?



Did you predict Covid? But there have been massive snowstorms before - go back to the 1950s and 60s. More recently there was the great storm of 1987 which downed trees all over a large part of the country, blocking transport.



I think Dec 16th or 17th is the last possible day that Sunak can call a general election and if he doesn't the election gets called automatically anyway, but the election itself is 4-5 working weeks later and the turn of the year has 4 days of holidays.
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Yeah it's understandable there has to be a gap of time between calling an election and actually having an election, for administrative purposes, allowances for opposition parties to gear up, etc.

If Sunak leaves it until 2mins to midnight just to announce it, it's going to look even worse than than it already does for the conservatives...

.. he should really call a GE for autumn before summer parlimentary recess/jollies, anything else will just look like abuse of process...

But lets face it, it wouldn't be the first time the conservatives have ridden bare-back over estabished precident and common decency in the last ten years, so I guess we wait and see.
 
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Even if an election was triggered in the midst of covid I'm sure it would have gone ahead as planned.
Agreed that none of the main parties inspire any confidence, I'm hoping that this will be one of the last ones before freshly built AI overlords usher in star trek / culture style techno-communism
 
Taziir said:
Even if an election was triggered in the midst of covid I'm sure it would have gone ahead as planned.
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In that scenario there would have been plenty of time to arrange for postal votes for everyone; I'm asking about something serious happening at near the end of a campaign.
 
To stop an election entirely you are basically looking at what could bring the entire nation to a halt at little to no notice?
To me this would have to be serious emergencies, such as being invaded by a foreign army, nuclear attack, widespead insurgency, rioting and such like.
In those circumstances you'd expect the govt to invoke martial law (or whatever equivalent we have), with no defined end date...
 
Taziir said:
expect the govt to invoke martial law
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Quartz said:
No, just short of that. I gave examples in my OP.
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Yeah, I didn't really address those as I would just be repeating what others already said that minor and localised issues are not going to block a general vote. Anything that stops everyone from getting out and voting would have to be a major national catastrophe
 
Taziir said:
Yeah, I didn't really address those as I would just be repeating what others already said that minor and localised issues are not going to block a general vote. Anything that stops everyone from getting out and voting would have to be a major national catastrophe
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You might want to read up on the big freeze of 1963 and the Storegga Slide and consider how disruptive repeats could be. The latter might inundate large parts of NE Scotland, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, and Norfolk and maybe London.
 
Quartz said:
You might want to read up on the big freeze of 1963 and the Storegga Slide and consider how disruptive repeats could be. The latter might inundate large parts of NE Scotland, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, and Norfolk and maybe London.
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Dug in to this with ChatGPT, which thinks that there is no established provision for how to handle those types of disruptions to an election, and that the decision on how to proceed ultimately would be with the current Prime Minister.
Assuming that this type of severe incident doesn't prevent normal government functions, then the government, electoral commission, and relevant stakeholders (such as local authorities) would need to consult and reach a consensus on whether to reschedule voting in affected constituencies.
So it's entirely possible that this could mean that some votes go ahead, while others are postponed until later to be ran as by-elections. And yes, this would absolutely cause havoc around who can form a government in event of a close tie in seats.
 
Most likely the Autumn statement will have some freebies in it, as a one last ditch attempt to sway some voters. A GE will be called shortly after that. Doing it around Christmas or depths of winter is likely to backfire on them.
 
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