Tag Archives: individual electoral registration

Caron Lindsay

“We are not going to let them anywhere near power again” – a PM too comfortable with power

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 7th September 2016 - 7:11 pm

Theresa May has not even been Prime Minister for two months. However, she is already displaying a complacency in power that is quite chilling.

At only her second Prime Minister’s Questions, she had this to say to Jeremy Corbyn:

What we do know is that, whoever wins the Labour party leadership, we are not going to let them anywhere near power again.

These are not the words of a Prime Minister who believes that power comes from the people.

You could dismiss that as banter if the Tories were not trying to stitch up the entire political system in their favour. Lib Dem Peer Paul Tyler warned of a crisis of legitimacy in parliamentary democracy if the boundary changes were allowed to go through:

Reducing the number of MPs without also reducing the size of the Executive is a mistake. With the pay-roll vote approaching half the membership of the government side of the Commons, the power of government to control Parliament is increased. And with no prospect of democratic reform of the Lords, we are edging towards a dangerous lack of democratic legitimacy in parliament.

The Conservatives are blatantly attempting to fix the system to keep themselves in power.

Individual electoral registration means that young people who move around a lot are unlikely to be on the electoral register – and they would be more likely not to vote Conservative. In April this year, a report, Missing Millions, outlined why this matters:

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 15 Comments
Alex Smethurst

Opinion: Registering young voters increases party loyalty

By Alex Smethurst | Fri 31st January 2014 - 11:36 am

Ballot paperThe move to Individual Electoral Registration later this year has the capacity to enable our party to re-engage with many young and new voters. Given our polling numbers, this is all the more pertinent, as registering young voters increases party loyalty.

There is considerable evidence that if people vote at the start of their careers as citizens, they are more likely to carry on voting. Rather than canvassing people sporadically, we should be targeting 16,17 and 18 year olds. Just like voters of all ages, young voters are attracted to candidates that reach out to them. Partisan loyalty develops during their first few years of being enfranchised. Reams of academic research in America show a young voters’ first presidential vote and party vote influence their party choice for decades. As Rock the Vote explain, voter registration remains the largest barrier to youth participation, but if they are registered, young people vote! Individual Electoral Registration opens the doors to the younger voters.

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Chris Rennard

Lord Rennard writes… Individual Electoral Registration: a journey from Tory instincts to Lib Dem legislation

By Chris Rennard | Thu 24th January 2013 - 5:37 pm

In 2003, the Electoral Commission recommended that Great Britain should follow the example of Northern Ireland and move to a system of Individual Electoral Registration (IER), where everyone fills in their own form. Labour havered for six years, fearing that ‘their’ voters might not register individually. It took until 2009 for them to introduce framework legislation to bring in individual registration at some future point, with no guarantees as to exactly when.

When the Coalition took office, the two parties agreed to speed up Labour’s glacial process.  Ministers settled on a transitional period encompassing the next General Election. The new system …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 6 Comments
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