An Independence from Europe, because it fielded candidates in all regions, also qualified for party political broadcasts, which featured candidates who were routinely shown on screen above the words "UK Independence MEP candidate". Only the word "party" was missing and even some hardened UKIP supporters were fooled into thinking that they were looking at a UKIP broadcast, especially when they saw a familiar face — Nattrass himself — taking part. Many other candidates standing for the new party were disenfranchised former UKIP members who might also have been familiar to some voters.

Naturally, strong representations were made to the Electoral Commission by UKIP's leadership and many of its supporters, but they got short shrift because the Commission had bizarrely decided that the new party's name was not confusing to the voters. Writing in a standard response to the many complaints it received, an apparatchik with the title "Assistant Advisor Guidance" wrote:

One test is whether in the opinion of the Commission a party name, description or emblem is the same as one that is already on the register; or it is likely to result in voters confusing it with one that is already on the register.

Neither the party name "An Independence from Europe" nor the description "UK Independence Now" was already on the register. Therefore we made the decision that the party name was not likely to cause voters to confuse it with another registered party.

We also considered the test of whether the name and description could result in voters confusing them with names or descriptions that are already registered. We decided that although there are some overlapping words, the party name and description are sufficiently different from those registered by the UK Independence Party (UKIP) to mean that in our opinion voters were not likely to confuse them with the UKIP name and descriptions.

In the fanciful world of the Electoral Commission, voters at the European election would easily distinguish between "An Independence from Europe — UK Independence Now", and the "UK Independence Party" and that there would be no confusion at all.

Yet the election result proved that hundreds of thousands of voters were in fact misled. An Independence from Europe scooped 235,000 votes despite being completely unheard of prior to the election. Scandalously, its vote was sufficiently high in London and the South West region to deny UKIP an extra seat in both cases, providing the country with two Green Party MEPs that it manifestly did not want.