'So public money can be spent suppressing the vote, but public money cannot be saved on the process for registering voters by doing it automatically'

Lord Rennard has been a Liberal Democrat Peer since 1999. He was Director of Campaigns & Elections for the Liberal Democrats (1989 – 2003) and Chief Executive (2003 – 2009). He joined the Liberal Party in Liverpool in 1973 and became the party’s agent in the city.

Last week, the four Parliamentary Boundary Commissions published their final reports. In 2020 the Government changed the rules concerning the implementation of these reviews so that MPs and Peers will no longer have a final say on the implementation of their proposals. The opposition parties opposed the change.

The Commissioners in my experience generally do a very good and professional job in drawing up constituency boundaries based upon the numbers of people included in electoral registers. The problem is that these numbers should reflect the size of the population that each MP is expected to serve, and everyone legally entitled to vote should be included on those registers. But they are not.

The absence of around 17% of the electorate from the registers means that we do not have “fair boundaries”, and we cannot have “fair elections”, even if that was possible under First Past the Post. The Electoral Commission estimated before the last general election that 94% of the over 65s were registered, whilst only 71% of those aged 18 – 34 were registered. Only 58% of private renters had up-to-date register entries, compared to 91% of those people who owned their homes outright. The registers omit many people who move most frequently, come from poorer and/or diverse backgrounds and people for whom English may not be their first language.

The excellent Unlock Democracy organisation is working with many other groups campaigning to improve our democracy to ensure the principle that, “everyone legally entitled to vote, is able to vote.”  Few people would admit that they disagree with this principle. But Conservative led Governments since 2010 have been failing to do what they can to implement it, whilst the registration rates for those coming on the electoral registers in preparation for voting after their 18^th birthday have plummeted.

The biggest problem is that the Conservatives actually disagree with this principle; claiming that people must have to “opt in” to the right to vote, even if the state at various levels holds proof of their legal entitlement to vote and could enrol them automatically. It is a legal requirement to comply with the electoral registration process. It remains so because of a battle which some of us fought against Government proposals in 2013 to move to a USA style system, without such an obligation, and no pressure to co-operate with the registration process. The Electoral Commission estimated that overall registration rates would fall to about 60%.

Nick Clegg initially signed up to this proposal before I pointed out that it would lead to permanent Conservative hegemony. We eventually retained a system of fines and introduced fixed penalties. The problem remains, however, that few people are aware of the potential fines, they are very rarely imposed, and research suggests that around 60% of the population think that the process is automatic anyway.

We do not have to “opt in” on a form to have the right to emergency health services, or the protection that comes with the Police, or our Armed Forces. Bodies such as the DWP, DVLA, Local Authorities etc. often hold data confirming someone’s address and their eligibility to vote. They should not have to go to a person to suggest that they may like to register to vote by, for example, applying online with their National Insurance Number to hand.

We have made small progress in encouraging registration in recent years. Students now generally register online when they are about to go to university. At Sheffield Hallam University, they began notifying students about how to register to vote at the same time. This was hugely successful and thanks to amendments to the Higher Education Bill in the House of Lords, Peers led by Labour’s Jan Royall and strongly supported by the Lib Dems, insisted that universities did this. But it is only a prompt to action, and not an automatic process as it could be since universities know the nationality of their students. I also fought a lengthy battle to persuade the Government that when the DWP notifies young people of their National Insurance Number (NINO), they could also be prompted in this way. But the prompt is hardly very pressing.

Before the 1997 general election, I was the Joint Secretary (with Pat McFadden, now Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury) of the Lib Lab Consultative Committee led by Robin Cook and Bob Maclennan preparing for constitutional change if and when the Conservatives were deposed. For a couple of years at least, our proposals were successfully implemented before Tony Blair’s big failure to move as promised on PR. Something is needed now to include as many opposition parties as possible and the plethora of academic experts on electoral law and constitutional issues. We need a draft Bill seeking to implement the principle that, “everyone legally entitled to vote, is able to vote.”

The Conservative Party in the UK has always been close to the Republicans in the USA. They have observed massive efforts by Trump and other Republicans seeking to win by suppressing the capacity of their opponents to vote. They gerrymander boundaries to make sure that they can win a majority of seats when in a minority. They seek to exclude people from the voting registers with little excuse, and to make it harder for some of those registered to vote in many ways including the introduction of Photo ID requirements at polling stations. Just 8% of white Americans lack driving licences, compared to 25% of African Americans. A Federal Appeals Court in the US found that Texas voter ID laws discriminated against Black and Hispanic Voters because only a few types of ID were allowed.  Military ID was acceptable, but university photo ID was not.

This is how we got to compulsory Photo ID requirements being introduced across the UK from May. The requirements are far more restrictive than those required to collect a parcel at a Post Office. They are also very bureaucratic and expensive. The Minister in the Lords admitted to me that the cost of the scheme to “solve” a virtually non-existent problem is over £100 million. So public money can be spent suppressing the vote, but public money cannot be saved on the process for registering voters by doing it automatically with less reliance on posting forms out and employing canvassers.

Meanwhile, the effects of introducing compulsory photo ID for those areas with local elections this May are now being examined. We know that with local elections in about 60% of the country and turnouts perhaps half what might be expected in a general election, some 14,000 people did not vote after being turned away inside the polling stations. More people will have turned away, and not returned, after being told of the requirements as they approached the polling stations. Most significantly, the interim study of this May’s elections by the Electoral Commission warned of “concerning” signs that voters with disabilities, people who are unemployed, or those from particular ethnic groups could be disproportionately affected by the policy. It also said that 4% of people who did not vote said it was because of voter ID – a tally that could run into hundreds of thousands more, especially in a general election.

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