In the Autumn of last year 2009 I was election agent for a by-election that came up in our district. We decided to stand a candidate at a late stage so we had a bit of a rush to get the 10 signatures for the nomination form..

I took the nomination form to the electoral office the day before the deadline to hand the nomination forms in, which was 12 o'clock the next day.

When I handed the nomination form to the head of the electoral office I said to her "please check it very carefully, we are all very tired and have rushed to get it completed". She looked carefully through the forms a couple of times but kept focusing on something on the front page. She looked curious. I said "it is okay isn't it?" praying that it wouldn't be rejected. She said "yes it's perfectly okay". I breathed a sigh of relief and phoned everyone to inform them that it had been accepted.

Later on that day I kept asking myself why had she had that curious look on her face. Had we indeed made a mistake on the form and she had not pointed it out to us?

We had in the last 9 years of fighting elections in Epping Forest had reason on more than one occasion to doubt the honesty of staff at the council. The same official I was dealing with there, had shouted angrily at me twice during the 2009 election when I asked her to put seals on the ballot boxes after the postal votes had been counted. These ballot boxes would have remained opened for a week at the council offices if I hadn't have stood my ground.

It was on my mind all day so I decided to go back the next morning to check the nomination form, making an appointment for 10.30. When I arrived there was nobody at the electoral office so i waited outside in the corridor for someone to come. After about 10 minutes of waiting and with numerous officials passing me in the corridor, a member of staff asked me if they could help. I informed them that I was waiting for a member of the electoral office to come as I had an appointment, and they informed me that no one from the electoral office was in that day.

I thought how very odd, the dead line for the nomination forms is this morning and there is nobody here and I had made an appointment. With the help of a member of staff we found our nomination form and on checking it carefully, I saw that where the name of our Party should have been entered on the front page, the name of the candidate had been entered instead.

Could this have been what she had been focusing on when she checked it, the reason for her curiosity. You can make up your own mind, but I was there, I am quite sure that she had spotted the mistake and had not informed me.

The nomination form would have been rejected if I hadn't have returned and I believe that the absence of anyone in the electoral office that day was part of a plan to stop us from standing in that by election.

With the  spectre of a general election looming on the horizon I sent  an e-mail to the head of Democratic services at my council pointing out an article that had appeared on the Internet, a quote by Stalin in fact about electoral fraud. It was a shot over the bow for them to be aware that we were on to them.

My e-mail caused quite a stir, with even members of my own Party not believing that officials of the council can be guilty of electoral fraud.

Please believe me, they are. They may be very polite to you, they may come over to you as being very helpful, but i believe a great number of our elections are won and lost (mainly lost) by these people. Do not trust them, they can be a bigger enemy to our party than the fascists of the UAF.