The Guardian view on voting rights: don't import US-style suppression
Democracy has many flaws, as Winston Churchill pointed out. It is also extraordinarily precious: the painstaking achievement of centuries of progress. In the UK, the system is stagnant. First past the post, defended for years on grounds that it excluded extremists, has done no such thing: since the 2016 referendum, a faction of hardline Brexiters has risen to power. But imperfect as current arrangements are, the right of all adults to vote in elections remains hugely important – a principle that ought to be shared by all democrats. That Boris Johnson’s government appears to be backtracking from this idea is one of the grimmest indications yet of where the current Tory party is heading.
The requirement to show photo ID in polling stations, which is expected to be introduced from 2023, looks very much like an attack on voting rights. Evidence of fraud, which the government claims is behind it, is minimal. Between 2010 and 2016, when there were two general elections and a referendum, there were just seven convictions. Research by the Electoral Commission following two pilots showed that the requirement for identification reduced the number of votes cast: in 2019, around 750 people sent away from polling stations did not come back. The Local Government Chronicle highlighted cases where even a small number of rejections could lead to a changed result: in Mid Sussex, where 78 people were turned back, several council seats were won with margins of fewer than 25 votes.
Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National party, Plaid Cymru and the Greens all oppose voter ID. So do important civil society groups. This resistance is why the implementation of proposals put forward in a report by Eric Pickles in 2016 has been delayed. But the government is now ready to trample the arguments of its opponents. Besides the lack of evidence of fraud, these include the impact on marginalised groups, whose members are less likely to have suitable documents: 47% of black people have no driving licence, for example, compared with 24% of white people. While in other European countries where ID is used for voting, governments issue national ID cards, in the UK 11 million people have neither a passport nor a driving licence.
But neither facts like this, nor the low turnout in many elections (in English local elections in 2018, for example, it was 35%), nor the warnings of US civil rights groups have deterred ministers. Instead, in pursuing measures that are expected to increase their share of the vote (since those excluded are more likely to be Labour supporters), they appear determined to mimic Donald Trump. In the US, voter suppression measures – of which ID requirements are one – are rooted in the Jim Crow south, and opposed by some on the right as well as left (on Monday the second-highest ranking Republican in Georgia refused to preside over a session in the state senate in which new restrictions were passed). For Mr Trump and his supporters, spurious claims of fraud are used to stoke racial hatred and paranoia.
To say that importing such measures to the UK is provocative is an understatement. At a time when cultural divisions are inflamed, and minority ethnic communities have been hit hard by the pandemic, it is incendiary. As well as penalising minorities and the parties they support, the talk of fraud that is sure to accompany legislation threatens to undermine trust in democracy and institutions more widely. It is not too late for the government to change course. If it refuses, these proposals must be resisted every step of the way.