Following reports that the UK’s Reform Party had sacked an inactive candidate, who hadn’t been responding to official letters and emails, only for it to turn out that his inactivity was down to the fact that he was dead, a journalist has claimed that the candidate was actually dead when he was selected. “It’s hardly surprising that they’d select a dead person as a candidate,” says Owen Prenk of the Barnsley Co-Operative Dairy Farmers’ Gazette. “After all, Reform seems to be designed to appeal to the rabid pro-Brexit demographic, which includes significant numbers of mad old fogeys waving their walking sticks at European-shaped clouds. Of course, many of them have died since voting for Brexit – how better to continue to represent them than by selecting one of them as a parliamentary candidate?” Prenk concedes that the selection might have been accidental. “Bearing in mind their core demographic, then it wouldn’t be surprising if someone had died during a local party meeting and been nominated and elected – it would be hard to tell the difference from a live member,” he muses. “But I strongly suspect that it was deliberate. Let’s face it, as he would have stood no chance of being elected to anything under a Reform banner, it was a low risk strategy. All he had to be was a name on a ballot paper to give the impression that Reform is a legitimate political force able to field candidates nationally in any election, at any level. As an added bonus, being dead, he was unlikely to do or say anything – liking racist posts on social media, for instance – to embarrass the party in the meantime.”

But, if he had been elected, what then? Would they have had him strung like a life-size puppet in order for him to make public appearances and attend meetings? Or maybe they could just have operated him from the waist up, via a stick up his arse? “I’m not sure that it would have made any difference,” says Prenk. “let’s face it, many MPs barely attend the House anyway and even when they are there, make little contribution. All they would have had to do was say he was infirm and wheel him into the Commons in a wheelchair – nobody would notice one more apparently comatose backbencher.” A dead representative would be even less noticeable at the local level. “Who ever bothers attending council meetings?” he asks. “There’d be nobody there to notice that a councillor was dead.” Prenk also believes that the alleged increase in support for Reform registered by some polls could be down to the number of dead and nearly dead voters it includes among its supporters. “I wouldn’t at all be surprised if the alleged increase in support for Reform shown in some of these dubious opinion polls is down to these corpses being unwittingly surveyed by pollsters,” he claims. “They could have called around to their house and not realised that the person sat on the couch was actually dead and taken their head falling off, or something, as an answer to one of their questions. Or, if it was a telephone poll, they might have called them just as they were expiring and taken their last gasps as responses.”

In a more worrying development, Prenk has suggested that some of these dead and dying Reform supporters could have been used in an attempt to artificially boost the party’s support at actual ballot boxes. “Most of these people were rabidly right-wing loons, with similarly rabid relatives,” Prenk contends. “For all we know, said relatives could have been wheeling the nearly dead comatose ones into polling stations to ‘vote’, guiding their hands to make an ‘X’ against the ‘right’ candidate. Worse still, the dead ones could have been embalmed, their corpses wheeled into polling stations on sack trucks by their rabid elderly friends and relatives in order to ‘vote’ with a pencil clutched in their dead fingers!” Electoral experts have, however, pointed out that applying for postal or proxy votes for dead relatives would constitute a far easier option for would-be electoral fraudsters than taking corpses into polling stations, although, they point out, there are strict measures in place to prevent such fraudulent use of postal and proxy voting.

There have been further claims that Reform and other fringe parties with similar support might considering taking the exploitation of dead supporters to another level, by trying to reanimate them. “Not only would a shambling corpse at least give the impression of activity, but thanks to their inevitably addled brains, they’d be easy to manipulate and would never be likely to question any of Reform’s policies, no matter how extreme and reactionary they might be.,” opines Fraser Goolson of the British Occult Political Review – Britain’s premier journal covering the intersection of politics and the paranormal. “Now, I’m well aware that, as a party of the extreme right, appealing mainly to ruddy faced white idiots, it would be difficult for Reform to resort to using Voodoo witch doctors to reanimate their supporters as zombie – they’re the sort of immigrants undermining British values and culture – but I’m sure that, unless low budget horror films have lied to me, there are plenty of mad scientists out there who could do the job scientifically.” Goolson concedes that, by now, it would be unlikely that any of these scientists were Nazi war criminals and therefore likely to be sympathetic to the party’s ideology, (unless they’d been conducting their longevity and revivification experiments on themselves), but was sure that many of the current crop trained under genuine Nazi mad scientists.

Despite Goolson’s claims having been dismissed as ‘bonkers’ and ‘utterly delusional’, a former polling official has come forward to claim that the living dead have, already, been attempting to vote. According to Michael Stromm, who worked as a teller in polling stations across East Grinstead for more than ten years, at council elections two years ago, his polling station was overrun by slavering zombies. “I can’t say for sure who they were turning up to vote for – it is a secret ballot, after all – but a lot of them seemed to have Nazi tattoos,” he recalls, shaking with fear at the memory. “They just came crashing in through the doors, arms outstretched, biting and dismembering other voters! We had no choice but to break out the shotguns and start shooting them in the head! But they just kept coming, wave after wave of them – the floors were running with blood and brains before we stopped them!” Stromm has further claimed that the zombie voter attack resulted in the government’s decision to introduce a voter ID requirement. “They knew that their brains were too rotted for them to grasp the idea of needing ID,” he gibbers. “Besides, even if they did have ID from when they were alive, their faces were too decayed to recognise them from it!” A spokesperson for the government has denied these claims and has pointed out that Mr Stromm is currently an inmate at a secure psychiatric clinic after being found not guilty of murder on grounds of insanity, following an incident at a polling station in which several elderly voters were shot.