Labour candidate breaks law with Twitter post

McCarthy has advised Twitter users not to 'tweet in haste'

Bristol East Labour candidate Kerry McCarthy has been accused of breaking electoral law after announcing her constituency's postal vote result on Twitter.

Section 66 of the 1983 Representation of the People Act forbids anyone revealing election results before the polls close, but McCathy said in a Twitter post that Labour had received more votes than the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats.

McCarthy has taken down the tweet, but only after it had been witnessed by many of her 6,000 followers and was retweeted.

"On reflection, I've deleted it. It's not counting, just random exercise," McCarthy later tweeted in response to her followers' complaints.

Bristol East council reported the tweet to the police. "This is a criminal matter and it will be for the police to decide what action to take," said a council spokeswoman.

If the police decide to charge McCarthy, she could face six months in prison or a £5,000 fine, according to the Electoral Commission web site.

"It was a thoughtless thing to do, and I very quickly realised that it was not appropriate to put such information in the public domain," McCarthy said in a statement.

"Because this was not official information, and no votes had been counted, I thought of it as being akin to canvass returns, i.e. telling people how well we were doing with Labour promises on the doorstep, but I appreciate now that it was wrong to do so.

McCarthy added that she had called the Returning Officer at Bristol City Council to apologise, and assure him that she removed the information as quickly as possible.

"I am not the first person to make such a mistake, and I'm sure I won't be the last, but as you can imagine, I'm cross with myself. Tweet in haste, repent at leisure," she added.

McCarthy also warned others not to repost her original tweet, as it would not be lawful for anyone else to publish the information.

However, her warning appeared only after her statements on the election results had been re-tweeted by the official Labour Party Twitter account.