Commons Sense

With local elections having concluded this week, we are reminded of the importance of access to voting in free and fair elections.

However, with the passing of the Elections Bill, I’m concerned with Conservative plans to make it compulsory to show ID at polling stations by 2023 for all upcoming elections.

Ministers claim this will make elections more secure by preventing in-person voter fraud.

Nonetheless, the Government’s own findings show our current voting system is safe and secure, with the independent Electoral Commission stating there are ‘low levels of proven electoral fraud’.

In 2019, for example, there was only one conviction and one police caution for someone impersonating another voter – hardly enough to swing election results.

Moreover, millions of people lack photo ID in our country, particularly elderly, low income, and Black, Asian and ethnic minority voters.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) even wrote to the Cabinet Office in 2018 to express concern about these proposals. More recently, 17 leading civil society groups called these proposals ‘dangerous’ and urged them to be dropped, because of the potential discriminator y impact. Ministers should heed the warnings of the EHRC and these respected civil rights groups.

Whilst the Government pledged that local elector IDs will be available to all free of charge, Ministers are yet to provide a cost estimate of their plans. In 2018, the Cabinet Office put the potential cost at £20million per general election. This money would be better spent on improving voter registration, because as many as 9.4million people in Great Britain are not correctly registered to vote.

I believe we must encourage more people to participate in our democracy and not create unnecessary barriers which make it harder to do so. These new proposals don’t fix existing problems and will likely just cause a whole host of new ones. This feels like a cheap trick pulled by the Tories, simply to obstruct citizens from voting - a ploy copied from Trump’s Republican Party in the US. Giving people a say at the ballot box helps make our democratic country what it is, and we must not do anything to undermine that.