The right’s war on the right to vote

Make voting compulsory to prevent “distorted” election results, Neil Kinnock told Andy Burnham this week, ahead of a House of Lords vote on legislation that would make voting a civic duty.

The former Labour leader and mentor to the prime minister argued that compulsory voting was becoming “increasingly justified and necessary” to strengthen democracy, warning that falling turnout risks diminishing accountability and deepening political disengagement.

It didn’t take long for the right to object.

In the Spectator, Terry Barnes dismissed compulsory voting as a mistake and framed it as the “progressive left’s solution” to voter apathy. Rather than concentrating on the democratic problem of millions of people failing to participate in elections, Barnes focuses on whether compulsory voting might benefit the political right or left.

He points to Australia, where federal compulsory voting was introduced in 1925, noting that conservative governments have governed for longer than labour governments since then, hinting, in a roundabout way, that compulsory voting might actually benefit Nigel Farage rather than Andy Burnham.

But that rather misses the point.

When fewer people vote, democracy is weaker

The debate about compulsory voting is not which party might benefit from it. It is that Australia has maintained extraordinarily high turnout. Since it was introduced, turnout has exceeded 90 percent, in all but one election.

Compare this to the UK, where in the 2024 UK general election, turnout was just 59.7 percent, a historic low. While in Manchester Rusholme – “Burnham country” – it was an “abysmal 40 percent,” as Barnes was quick to point out.

Indeed, the UK’s deteriorating turnout in elections should concern anyone who cares about democratic participation.

Yet the right repeatedly resist measures that make voting easier, while backing policies that put up new barriers. The result is an increasingly strange approach to democracy: concern about who votes appears to matter more than whether people vote at all.

The voter ID barrier

Consider voter ID. The Conservatives introduced mandatory photographic identification at polling stations through the Elections Act 2022. The Electoral Commission found that in the 2024 election, around 16,000 people were unable to vote in person because they did not have the required identification.

The reforms were criticised for creating additional barriers. Even former Tory minister Jacob Rees-Mogg acknowledged that voter ID had been introduced partly with electoral advantage in mind but had “come back to bite them.” He said the people most likely not to have the necessary ID included elderly voters who tended to vote Conservative.

It was an extraordinary admission, when the basic principle of electoral law should to make it easier for eligible citizens to vote, not harder.

And now votes at 16

Labour’s Representation of the People Bill proposes to extend the right to vote in UK elections to 16- and 17-year-olds, something that the Tories have long opposed. Opposition has focused on arguments about maturity, responsibility and the distinction between voting and other adult responsibilities. Yet in June, James Cleverley explicitly framed the policy as partisan, telling the Commons:

“The only consistent thing about that policy is the blatant party political self-interest, isn’t it?”

If extending the franchise is judged according to whether the new voters are expected to support one party or another, where does that leave the principle that eligible citizens should have a voice in the government that represents them? Democratic rights cannot sensibly depend on which way a newly enfranchised group might vote.

Reform’s nationalistic attack on democratic rights

And then there is Reform UK.

In August, Nigel Farage’s party published its proposed Election Integrity Bill, demanding sweeping changes to Britain’s electoral system. The proposals include removing the voting rights of Commonwealth citizens, restricting election material to languages native to the British Isles, severely limiting postal voting and allowing polling staff to question whether voters understand the voting process.

Farage also wants tougher rules on so-called “family voting”, with polling staff able to require people who arrive together to enter the polling station and vote separately.

Critics warn the draconian proposals could exclude millions from the democratic process, particularly non-English speakers and postal voters. Political commentator Narinder Kaur, called it “discrimination” and “racism” that’s “targeting black and brown communities.”

It’s difficult to ignore the political context, either. Reform’s support is disproportionately concentrated among white voters, with 75% of Reform supporters saying migrants coming to Britain undermine the country’s culture, according to British Social Attitudes analysis by the National Centre for Social Research.

When electoral reform starts narrowing the electorate, rather than widening participation, alarm bells should ring.

In America, some want to turn the clock back a century

The most extreme version of the assault on voting rights is being played out in the United States, where members of the Christian right are openly questioning women’s right to vote.

Doug Wilson, a theologian and pastor who heads the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, has called for the repeal of the 19th Amendment, which gave American women the vote in 1920.

Wilson claims feminism has violated women’s God-given role as a “weaker vessel” and says women should submit their voting rights and earnings to the male head of the family. Like the system used in his own congregation, he would replace individual voting with a “household” system, in which the family effectively casts a single vote. The goal, he argues, is to combat the “cancer of individualism” that, in his view, was introduced by the amendment.

And the most worrying part is that this isn’t just an eccentric fringe view.

Wilson has links to senior figures in Trump’s administration, including war secretary Pete Hegseth, who invited him to the Pentagon to deliver a sermon. In August 2025, Hegseth reposted a video featuring pastors discussing the idea that women should not have the vote. The segment focused on Wilson, who said: “I would like to see this nation being a Christian nation, and I would like this world to be a Christian world.”

And the idea is, shockingly, not confined to men.

Political philosopher Wendy Brown told El País that such views are supported by both men and women, meaning women who endorse them are “consciously willing to renounce their own status as citizens”. The clip reposted by Hegseth featured a woman describing her husband as the head of the household and saying: “I do submit to him.”

The idea of “one family, one vote,” with the vote effectively belonging to the husband, or to a male relative in the case of unmarried women, has found support among some women in Trump’s America, alongside the growing online “tradwife” movement, where modern women embrace 1950s-style domestic gender roles.

It sits within a broader backlash against women’s equality and the rise of the so-called MAGA manosphere, where reactionary ideas about gender are increasingly moving from online communities into mainstream political life.

And the assault on voting rights doesn’t stop there.

Using justice department lawsuits, FBI investigations and an executive order to limit voting by mail, the Trump administration is waging a war on voting rights. The moves mirror the president’s false claims he lost the 2020 election due to voting fraud, say election experts and ex-officials.

As Wendy Brown puts it, the threat includes “gerrymandering, voter-identification laws, and intimidation tactics that suppress Black political participation and reduce Black electoral influence.” 

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin has made similar warnings, that Trump’s SAVE America Act could disenfranchise women, young people and communities of colour by changing how states register voters and maintain electoral data.

“He [Trump] continues to push Congress to pass radical voter suppression legislation – at a time when we should be expanding the right to vote for every legal American, we have a president dreaming up ways to stop it,” he said.

Indeed, the very groups Trump seems intent on suppressing the voting rights of – women, young people and communities of colour – have historically been less likely to vote for Trump than white men, Pew Research Centre data shows.

The right’s growing emphasis on deciding who is entitled to a political voice should concern anyone who values democracy. Once the right to vote becomes conditional on your sex, age, nationality or perceived political usefulness, it ceases to be a universal right and becomes a privilege, one that those in power can decide who is allowed to exercise. History has shown us where that logic can lead: from the exclusion of women, working-class people and racial minorities from the franchise to the systematic dismantling of democratic rights under authoritarian regimes.

Democracy is not protected by deciding who gets a voice, it’s protected by ensuring that everyone has one.

Kinnock’s call to get more people into the democratic process should therefore be the starting point. This is not to say that compulsory voting and fining people £10 if they fail to cast a ballot as proposed is the answer, but that a debate is to be welcomed.  A healthy democracy asks how we give more people a voice. The dangerous alternative is asking who should be allowed to have one at all.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch