Regional campaign manager Facebook post says South Dorset candidate was made up
A Facebook post to a private party group by a regional organiser for the far-right ‘Reform’ party appears to be a ‘smoking gun’ showing that the party fielded non-existent candidates in last week’s general election – with a potentially huge impact on the overall result.
Tara Williams posted justifying the decision to field a made-up candidate on the basis that ‘IF Reform get in then a local person will be chosen as MP for South Dorset and encouraging readers to ‘vote for the party not the name 😊’:
Reform has been accused of fielding around sixty such ‘ghost’ candidates – or at least candidates who appear to have AI-generated images and little to no other online existence – and potentially more, gathering overall more than 280,000 votes between them.
These votes often had a huge impact in seats previously held by Tory MPs, for example in South Dorset – where the fake candidate ‘stood’ that the Facebook post refers to – the combined Tory-Reform vote far outstripped Labour’s narrow ‘winner’ and given that Reform voters would be most likely to vote Tory in the absence of a Reform option on the ballot, would almost certainly have prevented Labour’s win:
Reform came second in ninety-eight seats.
Byline Times, which ran the original story about the potentially fake candidates, has attributed the potential scam to increasing ‘Short money’ – the funds provided by the state to political parties depending on their number of MPs and total general election vote tally.
But there is another, more worrying possibility. Of the ninety-eight seats in which Reform came second, Labour won eighty-nine. Labour’s total number of seats last week was eighty-six over the 326 it needed as a minimum for a parliamentary majority – and a tight majority would have made pushing through the right-wing policies of Keir Starmer, the ‘long-time servant of the British security state‘, on weapons spending, NHS privatisation and other major areas far harder, while a hung Parliament would have made it near-impossible, at least without the support of other parties.
Labour achieved its 412-seat ‘landslide’ with far fewer votes than the Corbyn-led party received in either 2017 or 2019. Reform’s participation across so many seats in the general election effectively served to gift Starmer a huge parliamentary majority on a vote share that did not merit it.
Twitter observers were horrified at the potential scale of the alleged fraud. John O’Connell posted the original Facebook screenshot and observed that one confirmed case meant the likelihood of many more – and was decisive in South Dorset:
He also pointed out that, given there is there is no identity verification for candidates, anyone could come forward claiming to be the Morgan Young of the South Dorset ballot paper:
The BBC claims to have ‘debunked’ the ‘conspiracy theories’ about fake candidates. However, it only addresses one specific case – of a different candidate said to have ‘airbrushed’ his campaign image. But the BBC admitted that at least one Reform election agent admitted he had never met the candidate he was supposed to be representing, while claiming to have received a ‘very brief’ phone call from someone claiming to be the candidate.
Skwawkbox wrote to the Reform party on Wednesday, providing a link to John O’Connell’s Twitter thread and the screengrab of the Facebook post – the party does not appear to publish details of a press office or even a press officer, so this had to be done through Reform’s website contact form – and asked for comment on the apparent smoking gun. The party did not respond.
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