Voter registration campaign costs (FOI)

Produced by the Freedom of Information office
Authored by Government of Jersey on behalf of the States Greffe and published on 01 September 2022.
Prepared internally, no external costs.

​​Request 

Please identify the expenditure on trying to increase voter registration and turnout, for the recent and the previous island elections.

A further breakdown of expenditure on trying to get people to register in the period after the registration date had expired would be appreciated as well as a breakdown of staff time on preparation, media interviews etc and direct publicity costs.

Response 

Information in relation to expenditure on the 2022 election is exempt from release under Article 36 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 as a report detailing such expenditure is intended for future publication by the States Greffe. This report will be made available on the vote.je website within 12 weeks of the date of the request.

Information in respect of the 2018 election expenditure is provided within the report appended to this response. It is estimated that to establish whether information is held in relation to expenditure on the other previous elections and, if so, to collate that information, would take in excess of 12.5 working hours.  This would exceed the cost limit provisions allowed under Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011.

It is not possible to provide a breakdown of staff time as such information is not recorded and is therefore not held. Article 3 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 applies.

Articles applied

Article 3 - Meaning of "information held by a public authority"

For the purposes of this Law, information is held by a public authority if –

(a) it is held by the authority, otherwise than on behalf of another person; or

(b) it is held by another person on behalf of the authority.

Article 16 - A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive 

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

(2) Despite paragraph (1), a scheduled public authority may still supply the information requested on payment to it of a fee determined by the authority in the manner prescribed by Regulations for the purposes of this Article.

(3) Regulations may provide that, in such circumstances as the Regulations prescribe, if two or more requests for information are made to a scheduled public authority –

(a) by one person; or

(b) by different persons who appear to the scheduled public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign, the estimated cost of complying with any of the requests is to be taken to be the estimated total cost of complying with all of them.

Article 36 - Information intended for future publication

(1) Information is qualified exempt information if, at the time when the request for the information is made, the information is being held by a public authority with a view to its being published within 12 weeks of the date of the request.

(2) A scheduled public authority that refuses an application for information on this ground must make reasonable efforts to inform the applicant –

(a) of the date when the information will be published;

(b) of the manner in which it will be published; and

(c) by whom it will be published.

(3) In this Article, "published" means published –

(a) by a public authority; or

(b) by any other person. 

This response has been issued on behalf of the States Greffe. The States Greffe is responsible for the information held by (and on behalf of) both itself and the States Assembly.  Neither the States Assembly nor the States Greffe form part of the Government of Jersey and the Government was not involved either in the examination and retrieval of any information required for this response, nor in the drafting of the response itself.