Many people (including myself) criticised the plans to weaken the legal requirement to register, either because they oppose voluntary registration in principle or because even if they are warm to voluntary registration in theory they think that switching to individual registration and voluntary registration at the same time is a recipe for disaster. One should be done, sorted and settled in before the other is addressed.

As has been heavily trailed, the government is indeed thinking again and it is now:

Reconsidering an individual’s ability to opt out [of registering] – looking to either tighten this provision or remove it altogether.

Another area of criticism during the consultation was over concerns that the last ‘traditional’ electoral register would be too dated by the time the new process is brought in for it to be a good basis for the new process. However, running the traditional process for another year would run up extra costs running into the tens of millions. The government is therefore proposing a sensible sounding compromise of postponing the autumn 2013 electoral register canvass to spring 2014, so that it is much less dated when it is used as the basis for the new process but without requiring an extra canvass.

Many traps lie in the administrative details of electoral register canvasses, which is why I only say “sensible sounding compromise”; we’ll have to see how the details look as people pour over them in the coming days and weeks.

The government is also proposing to make more extensive use of data matching so that different public sector records are used to help populate the electoral register. You can read more about this and the other parts of the government response below.

If you are wondering why bother with individual electoral registration in the first place and why Labour first kicked off the plans for introducing it, see What’s the point of switching to individual electoral registration?

Government Response to Pre-legislative Scrutiny and Public Consultation on Individual Electoral Registratio…

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

One interesting answer by the Deputy Prime Minister which caught my attention was on the topic of individual voter registration. Asked by Liberal Democrat peer Lord (Chris) Rennard whether there would be changes to the government approach as set out in the earlier White Paper when we see legislation on the issue soon, Clegg had the following to say:

The short answer is ‘yes’….We set out our proposals [and] a large number of comments, and indeed very heartfelt concerns, have been raised about what it actually would mean for the register in the future….We will be producing very shortly…our response to the Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee’s report on this, which will include a lot of our new ideas, responding not to all of the concerns – and some of the concerns we think are misplaced or are exaggerated – but it’s certainly prompted us to look very, very long and hard at a number of issues.

…[w]hat we are trying to do here is firstly bear down on fraud – that’s the central motivation of all of this – but to do so in a way which doesn’t needlessly or carelessly disenfranchise people.

The whole evidence session is available to watch until Sunday night on the BBC iPlayer.

* Nick Thornsby is Thursday Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs here.

A new academic study of 99 people suggests the choice of building for a polling station can have an impact on people’s political outlooks:

The location of polling stations may influence how people vote with those near churches encouraging more conservative beliefs, researchers have claimed…

A recent study has shown people are more right-wing and negative toward non-Christians than those asked in sight of government buildings.

The findings raise significant “questions about how our spaces can influence our attitudes” according to academics.

Churches and other religious buildings are among the more common locations for polling stations and could therefore affect the results of a close election.

Professor Wade Rowatt, co-author of the study said: “The important finding here is that people near a religious building reported slightly but significantly more conservative social and political attitudes than similar people near a government building.

“For example, a higher percentage of people voting in a church instead of a school might vote for a conservative candidate or proposition.”…

The study was conducted in both England and the Netherlands by researchers from Baylor University, Texas…

In Maastricht in the Netherlands, passers-by were surveyed outside the Basilica of Saint Servatius and Maastricht Town Hall and in London they were surveyed outside Westminster Abbey and Parliament.

Of course, polling stations located in or near churches are in rather less grand surroundings than the environs of Westminster Abbey which, combined with the limited scale of the research, means caution is particularly appropriate in interpreting the results. However, the idea that physical location changes people’s psychological dispositions is an increasingly common finding in such research, as with the question of what would happen if you put polling stations on the first floor…

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

The constituencies in the PCC [Police and Crime Commissioner] elections are big, with over a million voters in some cases. There’s currently no provision for candidates to have Freepost facilities to deliver their election addresses to voters. Nor is there a provision for any sort of booklet for voters that would include candidates’ election addresses. Alongside the PCC elections, of course, there may well be elections for Mayors in the larger English cities. And candidates for Mayor will, on current plans, be able to pay a fee to have their election address included in a booklet delivered to voters across the city. So we’re worried that we’re currently heading for an odd situation, both for candidates and for voters.

A very good point.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

This year is already seeing all sorts of prognostications about the lessons UK political parties and campaigners can and should be drawing.

However, many of the differences between American and British election campaigns are not the result of American campaigners having good ideas the British should copy, but rather are the result of four key legal differences between the two countries.

First – and the only one of the four that gets more than the rarest of rare mentions – is the existence of donation caps in the US. These caps exist at relatively low levels. Americans can give a maximum of just $2,500 to a Presidential candidate, for example. There are ways partially around these caps – such as by donating to not just a Presidential campaign but also the national party of that campaign along with state and local parties or via the creation of Super PACs. But the rules do stop Michael Ashcroft or Lord Sainsbury style direct financial support. This provides an incentive to find small donors which does not exist in the UK, although it does raise an intriguing question about whether introducing such caps would therefore produce a similar US-style small donor revolution.

Second – in 29 US states, the electoral register indicates whether someone is a Democrat, Republican or some variation of independent (exact rules on this last category vary from state to state). This means that campaigns in those states start with a complete set of voter ID information. Whilst in the UK campaigns put huge efforts into canvassing people to find out which party they tend to support, in the US campaigns have that information from day one in most states.

As a result, canvassing in the US is much more about persuading people. Certainly some of the techniques involved – including matching canvassers up with people with similar outlooks and views, such as getting farmers to canvass other farmers – are eye-catching in their sophistication. But the apparent backwardness of British campaigns with their emphasis on much more straight forward ‘ask everyone how they are going to vote’ activities isn’t a reflection of a failure to learn. It’s also reflection of a different electoral system.

Third – it’s illegal for campaigns to place leaflets in people’s letterboxes in the US (18 U.S.C. 1725, known as ‘the mailbox restriction’). That doesn’t make delivering leaflets impossible but it does have an impact. It is a major reason for the popularity of door-hangers (leaflets that go over a door handle) in the US. But it – combined with the geography of the US – is also a reason why the sort of campaign dominated by the volunteer-delivered leaflet is frequent in the UK but so rare in the US. Again, it is the legal details that play a key role in explaining the differences.

Fourth – there is a very different legal and cultural attitude towards data protection in the US and the UK. All the main political parties in the UK have data they make available to their campaigners, but they are all rather more circumspect than most US campaigns. This certainly does not mean there is nothing to learn from the US about involving a wide base of helpers in a campaign, but again the legal details are important. British political campaigns aren’t slothful, they are less slapdash with other people’s personal data – and rightly so.

None of these differences, on their own or combined, are a reason to think that lessons can’t be learned from the US elections. But without bearing them in mind, the chances are the lessons drawn will be wrong.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

The neglect of the private renter is seen most often when the housing market is discussed, where it is frequently not only taken as a given that home ownership is what it is all about but also very little attention is given to making the private rented sector work better. You can fight through a bulging email folder of press releases from politicians wanting to make mortgages easier, cheaper, safer and more numerous before you find one that talks about tackling any of the issues renters face.

This week has seen the neglect in another form, with the Electoral Commission’s report into electoral registration. The headline picture is fairly straightforward. The evidence, “indicate[s] a decline in the  quality of the registers in the early 2000s with a subsequent stabilisation, but not recovery, from 2006″. Registration rates also vary greatly by age: “The lowest percentage of completeness is recorded for the 17–18 and 19–24 age groups (55% and 56% complete respectively). In contrast, 94% of the 65+ age group were registered”.

However, differences in registration based on class or ethnicity – often talked about – are not only relatively small (little difference based on class, less than 10 percentage points difference based on ethnicity) but they are dwarfed by the property dimension:

Completeness ranged from 89% among those who own their property outright and 87% among those with a mortgage, to 56% among those who rent from a private landlord. In relation to accuracy, the rate of ineligible entries at privately rented properties was four times that found at owner occupied addresses.

For the slump in electoral registration which went alongside the slump in turnout at the turn of the century to have since stabilised as turnout has recovered somewhat is an okay, rather than good, trend. To make it a good trend requires that private renting problem to be fixed.

It is one of the reasons why – done right – I think individual electoral registration is a good thing, as it will then be clearer to people in shared private rented accommodation what needs doing to get on the register and remove the situation I’ve often encountered out on the doorsteps of just one name registered at such addresses – an absent landlord.

Yet its also one of the major issues with electoral registration that gets talked about the least. Let’s hope the latest evidence helps to change that.

Great Britain’s Electoral Registers 2011

But they have, for the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 is now in force and the sorts of calculations that were relevant during previous political excitements are no longer relevant. A Prime Minister can no longer simply call an early general election because they want to.

Instead, there are only two circumstances in which a general election can take place earlier than the scheduled five years after the previous one.

First, the House of Commons can vote for one – but the number of votes for must be equal to or greater than two thirds of the number of seats in the House (including vacant seats).

In other words, even if Cameron had a single-party  majority, he could not fix an early general election. Only a Prime Minister in possession of a landslide or cross-party agreement could vote one through under this provision.

The second route is if the House of Commons passes a vote of no confidence in the government (by a simple majority) and then fails within fourteen days to pass a motion of confidence in a new government.

In other words, if Cameron were to demand an early election, call a vote of no confidence in himself and even get his own party to vote for the motion – there is no general election. Instead, Ed Miliband would get the chance to form a government first. It is only if he – and everyone else – fails that there is then an early general election.

Hat-tip: Thanks to Richard Morris for the idea for this post.

As the paper says:

The key issue is that many Returning Officers have considered that increasingly complex election counts would be better conducted the morning after the close of poll when staff are fresh and less likely to make mistakes, while governments, political parties and candidates have often pressed for counts in major elections to take place immediately after the close of polls. This has led to controversies in the public domain ahead of major elections.

Timing of Election Counts: Issues Paper

But how meaningful is the current legal obligation? Part of the answer to that has come in a recent Parliamentary Question, giving details of how many prosecutions have been commenced under the existing system:

2008 183
2009 67
2010 144
These data are collected by voluntary survey of electoral registration officers (EROs). The Electoral Commission does not have the power to collect this information and it is therefore not compulsory for EROs to complete the form.

Lord Rennard: My Lords, does the Minister accept that it really is necessary to carry out a thorough, door-to-door, face-to-face canvass in order to ensure both the accuracy and the completeness of the electoral register? Does he accept that failure to do so not only threatens the integrity of the democratic process but could also cause problems for people trying to obtain credit? Credit agencies check that people are on the electoral register to ensure that they can have credit, and failure to maintain the register in this way could mean that people are denied credit and businesses are unable to supply goods and services. That would be damaging to the economy and to social mobility.

Lord McNally: That is an interesting point. If I may return to the central point of the question, yes, doorstep canvassing plays a vital role in ensuring that registers are complete and accurate. That is why in both 2014 and 2015 door-to-door canvassers will be used by electoral registration officers to ask people to register to vote.

Not all the exchanges were quite so serious:

Lord Kakkar: My Lords, what impact might the opportunity to vote for an elected second Chamber have on voluntary voter registration?

Lord McNally: I think that it would have them flocking to register in their millions. The opportunity and the excitement that that would generate would be almost boundless.

It’s forthright message, headlined (in capital letters no less): “IMPORTANT RECOMMENDATION TO PARLIAMENT” is that with the legislation not yet passed by Parliament, there will simply not be enough time between it being passed and the proposed first possible local referendum date for the contests to be properly run. Instead, it says implementation should be delayed by a year in order to provide a sufficient gap between legislation and implementation.

This sort of warning by the Electoral Commission has become a regular feature of autumnal politics as governments of different political complexions have pushed through legislation ahead of the following spring. However, in this case their views are being expressed in a particularly strident manner.

That is no doubt due to the fact that the creation of local referendums raises far more issues of administrative organisation than the changes introduced by previous rounds of legislation. In theory, for example, some lucky voters could get to vote in five different referendums on the same day in the spring, with those different referendums taking place across differing organisational boundaries.

Localism Bill: Electoral Commission briefing for Lords Third Reading

As is often the case in such reports, it is the apparently obvious recommendations that highlight how something, somewhere took a rather unfortunate turn. In the case of this report, one such recommendation is tucked way unobtrusively in the middle of p.8:

Following any boundary reviews ROs and EROs must make thorough checks with the relevant Boundary Commission to ensure they are able to precisely identify the exact boundaries that are set out in legislation.

Indeed.

(700 people in Glasgow were sent poll cards telling them to vote in the wrong place.)

On the big issue in many people’s minds ahead of the elections, the report rightly brings good news. The 2007 Scottish elections were marked by controversy over the much higher proportion of rejected ballot papers than for previous Scottish Parliament elections.

This time, aided in part by the use of different ballot paperwork, the rejection rates fell right back down to levels last seen in 1999.

Looking to the future, the paper echoes the Electoral Commission report on the AV referendum when it comes to following up invalid postal votes and also promises a discussion paper on the thorny issue of when elections should be counted.

Scottish Parliament Elections Report – Electoral Commission

10pm cut-off for voting

The report raises again the big administrative fall out from the 2010 general election: the large queues in some places of people still wanting to vote when the polls closed at 10pm. Since May 2010, the Electoral Commission has called for the law to be changed so that people in the queue at 10pm can still vote and this report repeats that call.

However, given the lack of any new problems on this sort in May, it is unlikely to sway the government which has taken the view so far that letting people in a queue still vote simply changes a timing problem (a sharp 10pm cut-off) for a geographic problem (how do you define unambiguously who is in the queue?) – and anyway that the real problems was Returning Officers who planned very badly, being caught out by turnout levels that were not particularly high.

Linking electoral administrators’ pay to performance

The pay for Returning Officers has long been a concern of mine, including the way Returning Officer pay was quietly increased without anyone working out what the bill would be and the way that Returning Officers get paid in full even when they mess up, as happened most spectacularly in Wolverhampton.

The government introduced a modest reform in this area for the referendum with the legislation saying that local administrators would only be paid in full if their performance was up to scratch.

A little disappointingly, the Electoral Commission review does not really look at the impact of this change and therefore missed out on the opportunity to recommend either changes to this performance related pay system or for it to be applied to future elections.

Invalid postal votes

During the referendum, over 300,000 postal votes (around 6% of the total number returned) were disqualified because the paperwork had not been completed correctly. In some cases this will have been a matter of the fraud checks working as they should, such as rejecting a postal vote because a forged signature did not match the original signature on file.

However, the internal evidence from the rejected postal votes plus the lack of other evidence of fraud on this scale strongly suggests that the vast majority of cases were ones of human error by the would-be voter rather than attempted fraud.

Moreover, these figures exclude postal votes which were not counted because the Royal Mail delayed or lost them. Very little in the way of systematic evidence is gathered about how many postal votes are returned too late in the post, which is a shame as it might be a significant issue, particularly in certain parts of the country.

Two steps which could and should be taken are to gather such data and also to look into options for letting electoral administrators follow up after an election invalid postal votes with the voter. This would not only help identify fraud but would also identify those situations where someone has, for example, made a slip of the pen originally giving their date of birth wrong - which means that all subsequent postal votes from them are rejected without them ever knowing.

Although the review is disappointingly silent on the first point, on the second it recommends:

The UK Government should introduce legislation to enable Electoral Registration Officers to request corrected or refreshed personal identifiers from absent voters at any time in addition to the current required five-yearly refresh, and require
Returning Officers to provide information about electors whose postal votes were rejected due to a mismatch of personal identifiers so that Electoral Registration Officers can request corrected or refreshed identifiers or, where necessary, further investigate possible electoral malpractice.

Reporting of donations

One source of controversy during the referendum was the limited amount of information that the campaigns had to publish before, rather than after, polling day about their sources of funding. On this the Electoral Commission recommends:

We recommend that the Government consider the options for an element of prepoll reporting of donations, and introduce a suitable provision for future referendums. Once the loan controls for referendum campaigners are in place, as recommended above, we recommend that such a pre-poll reporting requirement should also apply to loans.

Electoral Commission – Report on the May 2011 Referendum

For all of their recent hollering, legislation to introduce Individual Electoral Registration was actually passed by Labour in 2009. They accepted then that the present system of household registration is inadequate and inaccurate. It leads to entries being left on the register when they shouldn’t be there, and it disconnects most voters from the process by relying on a single ‘head of household’. It also undermines the compulsory nature of registration. Some Electoral Registration Officers say it is difficult to establish who is responsible for registering people in any given property, unless it is a single person household.

Individual registration should ensure everyone has to engage with the process, and return their own form. Since all parties recognise that this is a long overdue step in reducing electoral fraud, and the perception of it, it is a pity the Opposition are now making such hysterical statements about getting on with the job.

However, there are defects with the Government’s proposals. Their initial ‘white paper’ on reform suggested that electoral registration should in future be voluntary. There would remain an obligation on households – presumably with the same defects as now – to return a “Household Enquiry Form” asking who was there, but it would then be optional for each individual to register. Electoral Registration Officers would have no “stick” with which to encourage potential electors to put themselves on the electoral roll. his would have led to a less complete register, and the independent Electoral Commission said so in its response to the consultation.

Nick Clegg is clearly listening on this point, and has already said in the House of Commons that he is minded to change the proposals to reflect these concerns. The Parliamentary Policy Committee I co-chair has made a detailed submission to the consultation, highlighting the proposed ‘opt-out’ as a key flaw in the draft legislation. It looks like Liberal Democrat pressure may now succeed in getting it dropped. We would like to see a new legal obligation follow for individuals themselves to return their form, so everyone gets on to the electoral roll in future.

Electoral registration is about far more than the right to vote. It affects the functionality of the jury system, and the principle that people are tried by their peers. If only a select group chose to register (it might be disproportionately the white middle classes), you might find suspects tried not by their peers but by those whose economic and social position is generally considerably more advantageous.

Beyond the state, referencing agencies use the electoral roll as the basis for offering credit, without which many of the most vulnerable, low income households might not be able to spread the cost of the more expensive items – furniture, washing machines, and so on – that everyone has to buy at some point.

Removal of the “opt-out” is not the only safeguard we want to see put into the legislation on IER. To prevent any largescale drop off in the number of people who are registered, we want to see a full annual canvass carried out in 2014. There could and should be more opportunties for ‘hard-to-reach’ groups to be registered, as they encounter the state in other aspects of their lives, whether through schools and colleges or through the benefits system. There is clearly room for considerable improvement in registering service voters too, espeically since it is obviously easy to know who and where they are. And the Government also needs to look again at whether the first register based entirely on individual registration – due after the 2015 election – is the right one on which to predicate the next boundary review.

I am confident that a great many of these safeguards can and will be built into the new system. Labour MPs are simply wrong to say that there is some nefarious ploy at play here, and that the Liberal Party – responsible for extending the franchise in the first place – would conspire to exclude the poorest voters from the register. That would clearly be unacceptable, and no Liberal Democrat will stand by while it happens.

When we do secure changes to the legislation, it won’t be thanks to partisan rantings on the part of Labour MPs. They resisted the principled case for individual registration for a full six years after the Electoral Commission first recommended it in 2003, and now they want to slow it down even further. All because they seem to believe that Labour voters just won’t register. But with a compulsory system, and new avenues of access to the electoral roll, there is no reason to suppose we shouldn’t be able to ensure everyone keeps their vote.

Either way, if any political party approaches this issue with a view simply to protecting its own interests, rather than the broader democratic interest, ministers are unlikely to listen. Our Committee is meeting Mark Harper, the Minister ‘under’ Nick Clegg with responsibility for Political and Constitutional Reform, to discuss the Government’s white paper next week. Let us know if there is anything you’d like us to raise with him.

Together, we can achieve what Labour failed to put in place: an electoral register which is both accurate and complete. Doing that doesn’t require delay, it requires innovation and action, and there’s no reason not to start now.

Mark Williams is Co-Chair of the Liberal Democrat Political and Constitutional Reform Parliamentary Policy Committee, and MP for Ceredigion

Submission to Individual Electoral Registration (IER) Consultation From

So far, the planned move from household to individual electoral registration in Great Britain (catching up with the changes made in Northern Ireland several years ago) has generated rather more political heat than light. But after the announcement from Nick Clegg at the last Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions that he is minded to part of the government’s plans, what is the outlook for the proposal?

Mark goes on to outline the three main issues, as you can read in his full post about electoral registration.

The Scottish Boundary Commission has an advantage over the one for England in having a much better IT (GIS) system, courtesy of proper geo-coding of the electoral register to deal with previous reviews at other levels of election and the more unified handling of the electoral register across Scotland compared to England. That is why they are able to provide tools like this and also why the Commission has the level of accurate data which means they can split wards and even polling districts in their proposals in a way that the Boundary Commission for England is avoiding as it is unable to do so accurately.

The Boundary Commission for England considered upgrading its own geographical information systems ahead of the current review, but concluded that it would be better to run the first review held under a new system using its existing IT systems and only upgrade for future reviews.

(The situation for the Boundary Commission for Wales is more like that in England than Scotland.)

Boundary Commission for Scotland: Initial Proposals

(Pdf download – 15 Mb – available here.)

However, whilst things that involve technology and electricity (text voting, internet voting et al.) tend to grab the headlines and get demands for action (usually from people who haven’t noticed the previous British trials which showed their failure to have a significant impact on turnout), the rather more prosaic act of wondering about which school halls to use and where to locate hired Portacabins doesn’t get the same attention.

However, help may be at hand – for experts who have studied the link between distance to vote and voting levels submitted written evidence to Parliament’s Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, which is currently studying government drafts of proposed election law changes:

We recommend, however, an additional draft clause that these reviews [of polling station numbers and locations] also take into consideration the accessibility of the polling station in terms of distance travelled to vote by all the electorate in the polling district and not simply cast accessibility in terms of physical access to the polling station by disabled people.

This is because the distance a person has to travel to vote can affect their propensity to do so, especially in lower-salience elections such as those to the European Parliament and local council elections…

In our work in Brent (Orford et al., 2011) we demonstrate that by moving a polling station from its present location to another location that represented the maximum density of voters in the polling district, turnout could be increased by up to 5%. Hence, even subtle changes in electoral procedure and their effect on aggregate levels of turnout merely serve to emphasise the importance of the perceived costs of voting and the sensitivity of voters to this in terms of the decision to vote.

Given the welcome move from often rushed electoral legislation with large numbers of amendments at the last minute all the way through (PPERA 2000? Please, never again) to publishing draft legislation that is then open to public consultation and cross-party committee scrutiny before being revised and put to Parliament, there is a decent chance that this time round the prosaic will get a look in.

The British National Party is under investigation by the European Union and the Metropolitan Police for alleged fraud and breaches of electoral law.

The dual investigations come as a former BNP administrator told the BBC’s Panorama programme that she was instructed to falsify invoices.

Those invoices were then submitted by the BNP to the Electoral Commission.

The BNP has strongly denied any suggestion of wrongdoing…

Former party worker Marion Thomas said after the 2010 general election she was instructed by the party’s treasurer, Clive Jefferson, to alter invoices and in at least one case stamp an outstanding invoice as “paid”.

The invoices were submitted to the Electoral Commission and had been altered, Mrs Thomas said, in order for it to appear that the BNP had complied with the law on election spending.

You can read the full BBC report about the BNP here.

The current electoral registration system is based on one registration form being delivered to each household, with the head of the household completing the form on behalf of everyone there and sending it back (“household registration”).

One reason therefore for switching to individual registration is a point of principle: someone’s ability (if they aren’t the head of a household) to vote shouldn’t be dependent on whether or not someone else has filled in a form for them.

This switch will also reduce the problems with rented property, where in urban areas particularly it is far from rare for electoral registration forms to be filled in with the name of the landlord (only), resulting in those living in a property not being registered and someone who really lives elsewhere being put on the register at that address. It’s regular experience in such areas for political canvassers to call on a house which is clearly occupied by several adults but to see that there is only one name on the electoral register – and to be told it is that of the landlord.

Individual registration will also allow the recording of “personal identifiers” such as signatures. This will in turn make it easier to take (further) action against fraud, either in postal votes or in impersonating someone else at a postal station. These anti-fraud benefits have been regularly mentioned by the Electoral Commission and local government electoral registration staff as a major reason for supporting individual electoral registration.

Postal vote fraud

People already have to give personal identifiers when applying for a postal vote (which are then checked against those given when a postal vote is cast). By adding in a need to give them when you join the electoral register too, it makes one type of postal vote fraud much harder – where you take the names of people on the electoral register who you know are not going to vote (e.g. because they have moved away) and then forge both postal vote applications and subsequent postal votes in their name. Individual registration, however, means you would need to have also faked information when someone joins the register – not impossible, but rather like putting a window lock in at home doesn’t stop the determined burglar but stops some, by extending the number of forgeries required and needing more planning in advance, it makes it harder and therefore should stop some postal vote fraud. It would also mean any forgery requires more organisation and more fake paperwork, raising the chances of forensic evidence being left behind, people talking and so on.

Impersonation at polling stations

Individual registration also would make it possible to tackle the risks of impersonation at polling stations. At the moment, there is relatively little protection against “impersonation” – turning up at a polling station, claiming to be someone else and getting to vote in their name – and political campaigners in some parts of the country fear that it is becoming the new favoured route for fraud. There was a brief, aborted attempt under Labour to try out asking for personal identifiers at some elections, but was abandoned after it was realised that the legislation passed to allow this was faulty.

Possible downsides of individual regsistration

There is a risk that the switch to individual registration will result in fewer people registering – because rather than relying on someone else completing a form, everyone has to fill in their own form. This is what happened initially in Northern Ireland when it made the switch, although registration numbers did then bounce back to a large degree. Quite how far back you think it bounced depends on how many fake electoral register entries you think there were in Northern Ireland before the change, a topic on which there are widely varying views.

There is likely to be a particular issue with universities, where currently the university authorities often automatically register all students who are living in university accommodation. To help deal with this and other issues, the government is currently piloting data-matching exercises which could highlight both likely missing names from the register and also suspicious, possibly fradulent, entries.

For the switch to be a success, it will require a significant publicity campaign, and may well also see political parties start to get more heavily involved in pushing registration than in the past. However, with both we can have a more secure electoral system which, by increasing confidence in our electoral system, also helps increase public involvement in elections.

The piece does not mention making electoral registration voluntary, as that is not a requirement of moving to individual electoral registration. On that topic see my response to the government’s consultation on individual electoral registration.