Annual Canvass

Each year the Electoral Registration Officer must, by law, write to all households in their area and ask them to confirm or update where necessary, the elector details of everyone in the household (over 16 years of age).  The aim is to ensure all individuals in a household who are eligible to vote, are registered.  All households will get a letter showing who is currently registered at their home.  If the details are accurate then please respond to let us know this.  If the printed details in your letter are of the people who used to live in your home, or there have been changes in your household, tell us who should be registered.  There are several ways to respond, but our preferred routes are text (for No change) or online (for No change or Changes).

While all households must receive a letter from the Electoral Registration Officer, there will not be a pre-paid postage envelope included with the letter.  So, while households can respond by post, they will need to provide their own envelope and a stamp if they want to do so.  Online and text responses receive an automatic confirmation of receipt.  Postal responses are not automatically acknowledged.

The letters we are sending are either on white paper or lilac paper.  Those receiving a white paper letter are those we have been able to fully match all the printed elector details for the household against records held nationally by the Government’s Department for Works and Pensions or data from Tendring District Council’s Council Tax or MiPermit systems.  While we want to receive a response from these households, particularly if there are changes to be made, we will not send them reminders.  For those receiving a lilac paper letter we will send reminders if they do not respond.  This is because, for whatever reason, we have not been able to match all of the detail for those in the household against the data sets we access. So we need them to respond to say if there are changes to be made or not.

The letters mentioned above will be posted around August 2023 and you should therefore expect to receive your letter around then. If you haven’t received a letter from us by the end of August 2023, please get in contact with the electoral registration team using the contact details below to prevent any subsequent forms being sent to you.

Please help us by responding early so that we avoid unnecessary reminders.  A reply to a lilac paper letter will help avoid those enquiries.

Alongside the letters, emails and text messages will go out asking people to confirm or update their details.  If you are concerned a letter, text or email about registering to vote could be spam/sent by fraudsters please contact us so that we can confirm it is from us or alert others to an issue and prevent criminals from profiting.

Please see below the way to confirm or update your household’s details:

Text, Telephone and Online information to follow.

If you have any electoral registration queries or are unable to respond to the canvass communication please contact the Electoral Registration Team by email elections@tendringdc.gov.uk(link sends e-mail)(link sends e-mail) or call 01255 686575.