Reminds me of the GOP running fake candidates in Democratic primaries here in the US. Right-wingers the world over love finding loopholes to exploit to gain an unfair advantage.
And Finally...
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
The Guardian has also learned that one Reform candidate suspected of being fake, in part because his official election photo looked AI-generated, is a real person.
The suspicions about Mark Matlock, who won 1,758 votes in Clapham and Brixton Hill in south London, were compounded when he did not show for the election count, with sceptics also pointing to an apparent lack of any photographs of him campaigning.
Matlock, who lives in the Cotswolds, said he did undertake a leaflet drop, adding that he understood the rush to get candidates in place: “The election caught us all on the hop and Rishi Sunak knew that.
Yusuf, a Muslim businessman who spoke at a recent Reform rally, is the founder of a luxury concierge company called Velocity Black, and gave Nigel Farage’s party £200,000.
Other donors to Reform include £125,000 from Jeremy Hosking, a businessman who recently backed Laurence Fox’s Reclaim party and the anti-vax former Tory MP Andrew Bridgen.
The original article contains 723 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I hope all those people and companies that tried to game the political system and not really stand face consequences for it. If it was legal but snakey, they should face boycotts. If it was fake, the person signing them up and voivhing for them should face fines and/or jail.
I've no problem with a real candidate with views I detest. The problem is trying to game the system by giving misleading or false information.