Sometimes it takes a computer ...

 I'm a dual Australian/UK citizen, meaning that I can have both a UK and an Australian passport - something that in the days before Brexit made travelling in Europe slightly easier as we could go through the EU citizens queue and not the dreaded and and slow 'All other passports' queue.

It also means that I used to be able to vote in UK elections - except that the UK used to have this sensible rule that if you'd lived outside the UK for more than fifteen years you were ineligible to vote, as you probably no longer had a close connection with the UK.

Well, for reasons best known to themselves, they changed that rule at the beginning of the year, so I decided to reregister to vote - really because I wanted to badger candidates in the upcoming election about why, because I live in Australia, my UK State Pension is frozen, but if I lived in Spain, France, or another EU member state, I would get an annual increment (actually, the situation is even more insane - if you tell the slightly Orwellian sounding UK Department of Work and Pensions you're visiting the the UK or the EU, they pay you the current State Pension rate rather your normal frozen rate for the time you are visiting - go figure).

Anyway, that's my business.

I filled in my online overseas voter registration form and sent it off, and heard nothing more.

In the meantime, I'd found my old UK drivers licence which had my last UK address on it, so I wrote to the electoral registration people to tell them in case they were having difficulty tracing me.

They weren't.

The real reason was

The hold up I am afraid is with our IT department who have to do a update to our system to allow these new regulations from the recent Election Act to go ahead ...

Let's hope they manage the upgrade before an election is called ...

[Update 23 February 2024]

Well, their IT division obviously managed to carry out the upgrade, as I had an email this morning confirming my voter registration and inviting me to apply for a postal vote.

There's a validation process, but hopefully that will be straightforward - and then we have to wait and see if the combination of Royal Mail and Australia Post can actually deliver my ballot paper in a timely manner - it used to be that a letter from the UK to Australia would only take about four or five days, but in these slimmed down days I have my doubts ...