In a democracy, the most fundamental of all rights is the right to vote. It is the foundation on which all our liberties depend. Yet for millions of people, plans announced in the Queen’s Speech today will make that significantly harder.
Under government proposals, it will no longer be possible simply to walk into a polling station, give your name and address, and cast a vote. Instead, voters will be required to show photographic proof of their identity. Yet more than three million people do not have any. Nearly 11m have neither a passport nor a driver’s licence.
Those voters are disproportionately poor, disadvantaged and non-white. The Electoral Reform Society, the Runnymede Trust and the Traveller Movement have predicted that Voter ID could cause widespread disenfranchisement among minority communities. As three US Civil Rights groups warned in February, such laws have a dark history across the Atlantic of suppressing turnout among black and poorer voters.
Any government that wants to make it harder to vote should face a dizzyingly high burden of proof. Yet in-person voter fraud—when someone walks into a polling station and pretends to be someone else—is vanishingly rare. There was only one conviction and one police caution for voter impersonation in 2019, and only seven convictions between 2010 and 2016. If fraud were happening undetected, we would expect this to show up when the real voter arrived at the poll. Ministers need to prove there is a problem before interfering with our democratic rights.
In-person fraud isn’t just rare; it would be almost impossible to organise on a large scale. Someone who wanted to corrupt an election could not simply keep popping up at the same polling station without being recognised by election officials. They would need to organise a team that could visit multiple polling stations across a single day. They would have to know precisely which voters were unlikely to cast their ballots, or risk exposure when the real voter turned up. Success would require military levels of co-ordination and implausible levels of secrecy. The reality, as the Electoral Commission found in 2019, is that it doesn’t happen.
It is no defence to say that people without ID will still be able to vote if they contact their local council in advance and produce written evidence of their identity. In the wake of the Windrush scandal, minority voters in particular may be justly wary about contacting the authorities to prove their credentials. And even if some voters know whom to contact, have the time to sit on hold for hours or to visit their local council office, and are willing to plan ahead, a barrier will have been erected to one group of voters that does not exist for others. That breaches the most basic principle of any democracy: the equality of access to the ballot box.
If there is a problem with fraud at the electoral level, it lies with postal voting. Yet even here, the scale of the issue is unclear. A good starting point would be an independent inquiry to assess the scale and causes of any problem. Then we could legislate on the basis of evidence, rather than anecdote.
In a state that does not issue its citizens with photographic ID cards, requiring photo ID to vote is shamefully undemocratic. It will suppress turnout and lock entirely blameless voters out of the electoral process. In the longer term, it sets a terrible precedent for partisan interference with the electorate.
In truth, the problems with Britain’s elections are not the fault of the public. Digital disinformation, fake news and violations of campaign finance rules are corrupting our democracy far more effectively than any voter who has lost their passport. Yet these are crimes of the powerful, not the powerless, which makes them of less interest to those in a position to legislate.
If ministers really want to clean up British elections, they should look closer to home. In 2019, the Conservative Party circulated doctored news footage, disguised its Twitter account as a fact-checker, and ran adverts using such “distorted” footage that even Facebook took them down. Cleaning up our democracy will mean tackling practices that benefit the powerful and the unscrupulous, not erecting new barriers to those most in need of the protection of the vote.
Voter ID takes a hammer to the votes of millions of people who have committed no crime to smash an imaginary nut. It breaches the equality of access to the ballot box, and sets us on a dark road of partisan interference in the electorate. In a democracy, it is for the voters to decide who governs; it is not for the government to decides who votes. This legislation must be resisted.
