From today you'll only be allowed to vote if you have photo ID. Be it local council elections, Parliamentary elections, mayoral elections, referendums or police and crime commissioner elections you'll no longer be able to walk into a polling station and claim to be yourself unless you have photo backup, else you'll be turned away. Some people think this is a good thing. They are wrong, it's cynical disenfranchisement pure and simple.
It's all because the government passed the Elections Bill 2022 into law last year which, amongst other things, requires voter ID in all future elections. Only parish council elections are exempt, where the risk of electoral fraud is presumably deemed acceptable.
It's been a long time coming. The proposal first appeared in the 2015 Conservative manifesto, but only to “consider insisting on proof of ID to vote”. Things stepped up in their 2017 manifesto with an intention to "legislate to ensure that a form of identification must be presented before voting". They upped the stakes further in 2019 promising "We will protect the integrity of our democracy by introducing identification to vote at polling stations." Note there was still no mention of photo ID because that was never a given. But while the nation was rightly much more concerned about whether the victor should be Boris or Jeremy, this plan was quietly slipping in underneath.
The reason given has always been the prevention of electoral fraud. Previously anyone could walk into any polling station, claim to be anyone and cast a fraudulent vote. It sounds plausibly destabilising when put like that, the scope for mischief, shenanigans and deceitful ballot-rigging plain to see. The reality however is that people don't generally enact worst-case scenarios, indeed electoral fraud occurs on a frankly minimal scale.
That's 119 allegations of personation in elections over a seven year period, of which nine led to a caution and three to a conviction. You are more likely to be struck by lightning than convicted of electoral fraud. However a lot of people think significant electoral fraud exists, and elections rely on trust, so the government's been able to argue that voter ID is a necessary boon.
And that's photographic voter ID, because the government could have chosen to go with a softer option like turning up with a polling card or waving a utility bill but chose not to. They even ran trials of different requirements in advance to see what happened. In 2018 they ran a pilot in Bromley, Gosport, Swindon, Woking and Watford, five areas not entirely representative of the wider country, so insufficient to draw full conclusions. In 2019 they expanded the pilot to ten local authorities and trialled three different options.
• in two areas people had to show a specified form of photo ID
• in five areas they could choose to show either a specified form of photo ID or two pieces of specified non-photo ID
• in three areas people could show either their poll card or a specified form of photo ID.
Only two of the ten areas trialled the most draconian requirements, the system we've now ended up with, those locations being Woking and Pendle. In Woking, who'd been part of the previous trial, 87 were initially refused a ballot paper of whom 22 never returned to cast a vote. In Pendle the number of non-returnees was 101 out of 284, that's 0.7% of all those who turned up. And while 0.7% might sound small that's easily sufficient to swing the result in certain close-run contests, which could then be enough to change who runs the council. It probably won't change yours, but with thousands of wards and hundreds of constituencies nationwide it's going to change someone's, especially in areas where photo ID isn't ubiquitous.
Acceptable photo ID now includes...
• a passport
• a driving licence
• a concessionary photo travel pass
• a Blue Badge scheme card
• a national identity card issued by an EEA state
The government did some research and estimated that 92% of the electorate have at least one of the above. People who don't drive, don't go abroad and aren't old enough to have a bus pass are plainly at a disadvantage. For example latest figures show three-quarters of white people have a full driving licence but only 60% of Asian and mixed-race people and 50% of black people do, while the younger you are the less likely you are to have passed your test. Student passes also aren't included in the list whereas multiple cards for pensioners are.
Because of these gaps there's one additional form of acceptable ID...
• A free Voter Authority Certificate issued by a local electoral registration officer
Which sounds great - everyone who wants to vote can do so - except this adds an extra layer of friction in advance of voting. It's hard enough persuading many people to sign up on the electoral roll in the first place, let alone additionally remembering to send a photo to the council in advance. What's more you had to apply for a Voter Authority Certificate by 5pm on 25th April, i.e. it's now too late realise you might have needed one, so the disenfranchisement trap may already have sprung shut.
In an opinion poll released yesterday, 14% of those surveyed were unaware that photo ID was now required to vote. More worryingly the same poll found that 5% of respondents didn't possess an acceptable form of identification, a result that could scale up to millions of people UK-wide. That percentage rises to 11% of those earning less than £20,000 a year, which is disturbingly high, whereas only 1% of the £40,000+ bracket are without. Unsurprisingly this translates to 6% of potential Labour voters but only 2% of Conservative voters, and this perhaps is why the government were so keen to rush it through.
You can of course avoid all this hassle by applying for a postal vote. Fraud remains perfectly possible by post, indeed it was at the heart of some of Tower Hamlets' murkier electoral dealings, but that avenue remains open. Also the deadline for applying for a postal vote was April 18th so again this requires a degree of forward planning. Thousands of people across the country have woken this morning without photo ID, a Voter Authority Certificate or a postal vote and it is already too late for them to exercise their democratic right. "You could have voted" is no replacement for "go away, you can't".
And the government isn't intending to count how many people are turned away. Many polling stations will have official greeters outside checking that voters know the new rules, and if people turn back at this point they'll not be included in any statistics. The 2019 pilot schemes did note a drop in turnout in the affected districts, but this mirrored falls in many other areas, it being impossible to track the effect of one change amongst a multiplicity of other factors. Unless turnout properly collapses this year it'll be all too easy to ignore downward trends again.
If you dig back, the impetus to introduce voter ID came from a review of electoral fraud conducted in 2016 by Sir Eric Pickles. The same man who squeezed council funding until it squeaked as part of the Coalition's austerity programme also recommended the imposition of photo ID... who'd have guessed. But he only did that because, if you dig back further, the Electoral Commission suggested it. Because the push for voter ID actually came initially from the independent body who oversee our electoral process because they wanted to improve it.
In 2014 the Commission conducted a review into electoral fraud vulnerabilities which concluded that polling station voting in Great Britain remains vulnerable to personation fraud. We see a potential problem, they said, so we should do something about it. In one respect the government have only taken them up on that, and run with it, and delivered. But they've also gone with the strictest possible version of voter ID, tougher even than the majority of US states, whereas they could just have plumped for allowing polling cards as ID and reduced the negative impact.
The Electoral Commission's original intention was to increase public confidence in the electoral system. Trust in democracy fades if the electorate doesn't believe the result is valid, as we've since seen amply demonstrated in Trump's America. But they acknowledged it was mostly a potential problem, and they recognised the need to balance inclusion and trust, and they spent most of their review considering how a Voter Card might work. Nine years later they've got their way and that Voter Card has finally materialised, but perhaps not with the high level push and publicity they'd intended.
If you're thinking you don't see what the problem is, that's probably because you already have some form of photo ID so it won't disadvantage you. If your confidence in the electoral process has increased, that's probably because you imagine electoral fraud is far more widespread than it really is. If you're in London or some other area with no elections you don't even have to engage with the issue until next year, by which time it'll already be an established restriction. And if you're a government minister you're probably delighted at slipping this through, gifting your party an edge in every future election everywhere. It'll pay off somewhere someday, even if not right here and now.
There was no major issue with electoral fraud. There are now a significant number of people who won't be able to vote. And parties with less-engaged, less well-off supporters are now permanently borderline disadvantaged.
From today you'll only be allowed to vote if you have photo ID. Be it local council elections, Parliamentary elections, mayoral elections, referendums or police and crime commissioner elections you'll no longer be able to walk into a polling station and claim to be yourself unless you have photo backup, else you'll be turned away. Some people think this is a good thing. They are wrong, it's cynical disenfranchisement pure and simple.
