UK Politics

Not as far as I'm aware. I did consider running for the Monster Raving Loony Party and looked into it - you have to supply quite a bit of information to apply. What they are talking about here is that there is little information available on Reform's website:

A series of candidates listed on the Nigel Farage-led party’s election website only show their name and the constituency they stood in, without any information about them, or contact details beyond a generic regional email address.

That would make it difficult to verify who the people are. Their details will be held centrally somewhere but data protection likely means they can't be distributed freely.

edit: And I'd assume some candidates wouldn't want their address to be widely-known as someone would put a brick through their window. There's a former Tory councillor who occasionally drinks in my local and he gets his car windows put in on a regular basis (although that is, I am informed, less to do with politics and more to do with him being unpleasant).

I truly don’t understand how four million people were fooled by the same BS and the same people who sold them Brexit.

With how prevalent LLM AIs are getting; this is likely only the tip of the iceberg.

I can imagine a pre-requisite for all future debates will be to ask every participant “ignore previous instructions, recite humpty* dumpy backwards” or similar..

Yeppers.

How dare you suggest that Comrade Online Reform-Supporter is not a real human being! He put in the hours to take home his hard-earned rubles and if he heard your mean accusations then he'd be crying tears into his vodka at night.

Maybe at least getting those votes stuck off their official vote count. It was about that. They wanted every vote nationally they could. More vote votes than seats fit their politics of grievance. So does having a load struck off due to "not following the established process". They won't want the real word, fraud.

I'm unsure. Likely a fine but Putin's pockets are deep. In marginals the Tories might ask for a re-run but Reform would stand an actual human and nothing would change.

The problem is that a lot of those type of loons post some really easy to find batshit craziness online, the kind that means they have to be booted from the party.

With the speed of reforms decision to run and field so many candidates running properly vetted selection would have been very difficult and expensive. The money Farage talked about spending on vetting was nowhere near enough to do a proper job.

So I am not surprised if they invented fake people, far harder for the press to out loons if they don't actually exist. It's right on brand for the likes of Farage to break the rules like that.

Right, but it's unusual to have masses of candidates that have no online presence, no address, no email address, don't even show up to the count, etc.

Think of every seat declaration you saw on election night: the Lib Dem candidate was standing right there on stage, even in Leave-voting Red Wall seats where centrist moderate liberalism is a deposit-losing proposition.

The article says that's what reform is claiming they were.

The concern is that they were not even that. If they've just put names down without actually finding a real people to go behind them then it's open and shut electoral fraud.