We registered for overseas voting about a month ago, just after we found our apartment.
The polling cards turned up at our redirection service last week, too late to get them to HK and back.
This will be the first time I haven’t voted since I was eighteen.
And that makes me sad. Not as sad as I’ll be if AV gets voted down, though.
Blast – you can’t vote at the embassy?
Mmm. Why we have the dipcorps: I imagine there is A Procedure They Have For This Eventuality as you and C won’t have been the first in this bind. You are in the fons et origens of British Mandarism, after all, out there in HK, no?
Indeed. But the key thing is you have to register as an overseas voter (which I have done). But you can only do this when a) you have left the country and b) you have an address, and I waited until we had a permanent flat rather than risking it going to our serviced apartment which would only forward items for a month.
The overseas voter registration has to be done where you last lived in the UK (so Islington) and there is no apparent time scale on how long the council needs to take to get back to you.
So we need to get our vote in 11 working days before election = 15th April. Post is variable here, so we probably need to leave two weeks which is start of April and we only moved in in the middle of March, which given the post means it is pretty well impossible.
Just timing, I’m afraid, and nothing we could do about it. Online voting would have removed the issue completely.