The Electoral Commission report on Voter ID in the General Election found that 16,000 would-be voters were turned away by polling officers because they did not have approved ID. But the picture is much worse than that, because many people simply did not turn up at the polling station because of the ID rules, or were stopped by the greeter and never returned. In fact, the Electoral Commission reckons that 750,000 people might not have voted in the General Election because of the need for Voter ID.
The report also found that while most people were aware of the requirement for Voter ID, 29% of people aged 18- 24 did not know about it and 24% of people from ethnic minority communities were unaware. In general, the impact was felt greatest by those two groups plus voters in social grade C2DE.
This is a topic I have written about before. On the day after the local elections in 2023, when Voter ID was first introduced, I asked: “Voter ID – did it prevent electoral fraud or did it interfere with voters’ rights?“. The answer came the following month with another report from the Electoral Commission: “14,000 voters turned away – but probably many more“. Then a month later a letter appeared in the press from eminent ethnic minority actors and artists, calling for the abolition of Voter ID because of its disproportionate impact on people of colour: “Actors and artists back the abolition of Voter ID“.
There are two possible responses to the latest findings. Either increase the types of acceptable photographic ID or abolish Voter ID altogether.
The Electoral Commission recommends that “The UK Government should undertake and publish a review of the current list of accepted forms of ID, to identify any additional documents that could be included to improve accessibility for voters.” At the moment travel passes for older people are acceptable but bizarrely those for young people are not. They also suggest that any voter who does not have a acceptable form of ID should be able to take a registered voter with them to the polling station to attest for them.
The other option – embraced by the Lib Dems, is to abolish Voter ID altogether. Its original purpose was to stop impersonation – when someone fraudulently claims to be someone else and steals their vote. This is a crime, of course, but one that seems to happen extremely rarely. Between 2019 and 2023 only 11 people were convicted of it.
One of the anomalies in the system is that no-one needs photo ID to apply for a postal vote or to submit their ballot by post. And yet postal vote fraud is much more plausible than impersonation.
Personally I would have no problem with a requirement to bring a polling card to the polling station – most people already do that. But the need to bring an acceptable form of photo ID is clearly a sledge hammer to crack a nut, and is very damaging to our democratic processes. Some have suggested that it is a deliberate form of voter suppression. Maybe, but we do have to ask why it was introduced in the first place.
Unlock Democracy (which is headed by former Lib Dem MP Tom Brake) is asking people to add their name to a letter calling on the Government to scrap Voter ID. You can sign it here.
* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
Follow @LibDemVoice on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Morecambe and Wise and Leonard Rossiter
Full slate of Lib Dems in council by-elections
Getting things done - West Port #dundeewestend
Payback time
Katharine Pindar
David Warren
David Raw
7 Comments
As I recall, one of those suggesting that the introduction of photo ID was “a deliberate form of voter suppression” was Jacob Rees-Mogg, his only regret being that a lot of the votes which were suppressed were Conservative ones.
But you are right to flag up postal vote fraud. This infamously took place on an industrial scale in two divisions of Birmingham back in 2004. As it was the Labour Party which was responsible, it should perhaps come as no surprise that no action was taken. The judgment of the Election Commissioner, Richard Mawrey QC, carried an incandescent postscript referring to
“evidence of electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic”
and concluding
“The fact is that there are no systems to deal realistically with fraud and there never have been. Until there are, fraud will continue unabated”.
While we are on the subject of the Labour Party in Birmingham, perhaps someone could ask the A-G what action has been taken/will be taken against Muhammed Afzal, the defeated Labour candidate in the Aston ward last year, who had the brass neck to bring an election petition in the course of which (I quote from the judgment) he “served evidence from himself and others which was and he must have known to be false”.
In most countries in Europe, the acceptable forms of ID are National ID cards or passports. The people there don’t spend their time complaining about being “oppressed” or “denied the vote” because they are fully aware that being asked to produce ID really is no more of a big deal than being asked to actually register for the vote.
I actually served as a polling clerk and the only people who were turned away were two or three people who forgot to being ID (all of whom returned within 10 minutes or so with it as they lived locally), one young person who hadn’t registered to vote until after the deadline (and who was a bit put out by not having a vote) and two people who turned up on spec as they were walking by the polling booth and who thought you could vote at any polling booth in the region (and who were bemused they’d have to vote in their home polling station as it was miles away).
One very minor point on this: Mary, you say, “”At the moment travel passes for older people are acceptable but bizarrely those for young people are not” I believe the reason for this is it’s impossible to obtain passes such as the Older Person’s Bus Pass and the TfL 60+ London Oyster Photocard without first proving your identity – hence why they count as acceptable ID. By contrast many of the travel passes available to young people can easily be obtained on proof only of age – not of your full ID. That’s why you wouldn’t be able to use them as photo ID for voting.
More generally, I suspect the problem of some people not having photo ID and so not being able to vote will gradually go away by itself as the requirement becomes more embedded in the public consciousness and people get more used to having it.
@Paul R –
Surely in the countries you mention, people have ID cards as a matter of course. Rightly or wrongly, in the UK we don’t; and the reason for demanding photo ID at the polling station was the calculation that the people who didn’t have photo ID were the most likely to want to vote against Mr Mogg’s party. Even if it is a minor interference with the franchise, no such interference should be acceptable unless it is shown on an evidenced basis to be necessary.
And could one out of 72 people make the enquiry of the Attorney-General about Mr Afzal?
@Neil H – Yes, people do have officially issued government ID in many of those countries. It is not however mandatory for them to carry it in all such countries. It just isn’t a big deal to produce some form of official ID when asked. Nor indeed is an argument that the UK doesn’t issue National ID cards an excuse since there is nothing other than obstinance preventing the UK from doing so. Indeed, it should be pointed out that if for some reason you lack either a driving licence or passport (both IDs which almost all adults have), there was and is a free voter ID available from your local council. Yes, you do have to apply for it but why is that a bid deal when we all have to apply to have our vote in the first place? If the latter isn’t an “unfair imposition” than we can hardly decry the former as one…
Given the need for photo id was clearly printed on the polling card, we have to ask why did so many claim not to know about it. I suggest their ignorance is probably more to do with their lack of interest and engagement in voting than other factors.
The EC report also includes an interesting table (Table 1), which shows “ The trend in the data above suggests that fewer voters, proportionally, are being affected by the voter ID requirement with each election.”
Additionally, we can be sure that voter fraud was running at a higher level than the number of recorded convictions, yet probably still at a level that in many constituencies would not have had any real impact o the result.
Automatic voter registration is part of the solution. It would not be absurd to make voter registration compulsory though not voting that should be made as easy as possible. If we allowed illegal immigrants to become nationals after a short period given some requirements, voter registration could become a sort of identity check and solve not knowing how many people are actually in the country.