Voter ID was first introduced at the Local Elections in England in 2023. At the time Lib Dems expressed strong reservations about the scheme for two reasons:

1. Experience in other countries has shown that the requirement for Voter ID amounts to voter suppression, and that it disproportionately affects certain groups, such as those living in poverty and ethnic minorities.
2. Voter ID is a solution to a problem that barely exists – voter impersonation happens very rarely.

At the time I wrote about my experience of telling at Woking – now proudly a Lib Dem run Council with a new Lib Dem MP. According to the Electoral Commission 14,000 voters were turned away in 2023 in England because of not having the correct ID. However this figure did not include all those who were picked up by greeters outside the polling station and who never returned.

Those elections only affected a proportion of electoral areas and I suggested that up to 40,000 would have been turned away in England if it had been a General Election. But I greatly underestimated. The Guardian reported some research by More in Common that claimed that 400,000 would-be voters across the UK did not vote in this year’s General Election because of the ID rules and practices.

Helen Morgan has been vocal on this issue for some time, and we have reiterated our position recently.

Today a large group of eminent ethnic minority actors, artists and others in the public eye, including Lenny Henry, Anish Kapoor, Adjoa Andoh, David Harewood, Sophie Okonedo and Gary Younge, have sent an open letter to the Prime Minister:

Dear Prime Minister,

We, the undersigned, write to urge you to repeal the unfair Voter ID laws brought in under the last Government.

More than 400,000 were prevented from voting on the day you became Prime Minister. 6.5% of voters of colour reported being turned away from the polls at least once.

The appalling statistics and stories coming out of election day are clear: these anti-democratic laws were an attack on Black and Brown people, and other marginalised communities. They do nothing to further democracy.

Polling shows that minority communities were 2.5 times more likely to be stopped from voting than white people. Yet again, our democracy is working against us, rather than for us.

We know that the last Government put this law in place to further their own party political interests. They knew it was more often poor, Black and Brown people that don’t have the right ID. The former Conservative Minister Jacob Rees Mogg himself even described it as an attempt at “gerrymandering.”

These laws are an attack on the democratic rights of people of colour, and leave people without a say in the running of our country. Our right to vote is even more important at a time when over half of Black children are living in poverty in Britain. People have been denied a say in shaping our country’s future. This has to change before the next election.

Voter ID rules represent a solution no one asked for, to a problem that didn’t exist. Just 0.1% of voter fraud allegations between 2017-2022, when this law was introduced, resulted in a conviction. Two people convicted, Prime Minister. And that was a period covering not one but two general elections. And yet hundreds of thousands have just been prevented from engaging in democracy.

It’s not using a sledge hammer to crack a nut, it’s bringing in a wrecking ball. Rather than spending £180 million of taxpayers’ money every decade on unnecessary guidance and clamping down on a non-existent problem, we should simply let people vote – and celebrate them doing so. As the UK’s new Prime Minister, that historic responsibility falls to you.

It doesn’t have to be like this. In many countries, people are placed automatically on their electoral register. That should happen here – but instead in the UK, the previous Government put obstacles in people’s way. The result: historically low turnout.

In a democracy, every vote should count. It’s time our communities got their vote back.

Prime Minister, please scrap voter ID laws, and look urgently at implementing automatic voter registration.

The full list of signatories can be seen here.

They are right. Let’s ensure that the new Government does not simply tinker around the edges of Voter ID but scraps it completely.

* 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.