A vote too far? How we lost the vote on electoral registration

In the end it was probably too much to expect the House of Lords to take on the Government twice in one week. So last week whilst we were celebrating George Osborne’s defeat on working families tax credits we also saw the confirmation of the Government’s policy on fast forwarding the introduction of Individual Electoral Registration (IER).

By just 11 votes it was confirmed that the cut off point to confirm eligibility to remain on the electoral register will be moved to December 2015 despite the recommendation of the Electoral Commission, the official watchdog, that the cut off point should be December 2016.

It matters as the December 2015 electoral register will be the one used by the Parliamentary Boundary Review for the pending review of Parliamentary Boundary Reviews.

Much has been written on LabourList and elsewhere on the impact of the introduction of individual voter registration. What is evident is that we have placed the burden for the most radical change in the franchise in the last 100 years onto cash-strapped local councils. On top of that the newly elected Conservative Government chose for purely electoral advantage in June 2015 to ignore the advice of the Electoral Commission and rush through the changes to electoral registration.

So the forthcoming parliamentary boundary (and subsequent local government boundary reviews) will be conducted on the least accurate electoral register for generations. There is nothing wrong in principle with individual voter registration but we have implemented in the UK in the worst possible way.

In most countries, such as Australia and many progressive states in the US, IER has been combined with the principle of automatic registration to ensure greater accuracy. Here we have relied on the principle of ‘opting in’ and written confirmation after every change of address.. Needless to say such a bureaucratic approach favours stable communities to those with more mobile populations.

On current estimates up to 20% of the eligible population in London boroughs such as Westminster and Hackney could be disenfranchised after December 2015. Overall up to eight million eligible voters will be missing from the December 2015 electoral registers. Needless to say such a discrepancy is not spread evenly across the population.  It is estimated that 90% of those who are white, elderly and home owners who live in shire areas will be registered compared to 10% of those who are under 30, BME and private renters in inner cities. Even though the population and eligible electorate are increasing in our major conurbations all will see a decline in their parliamentary representation at the next boundary review. Apart from the democratic deficit it also has huge implications for the composition of juries and representative justice.

Whilst registration drives by organisations such as Momentum are helpful we should be realistic about their impact. What is needed are longer term solutions that change our antiquated and institutionally discriminatory registration system and recognising that voter registration is a civic duty.

In particular we have to recognise that in the modern age we don’t need 400 local councils involved in the voter registration process.  They don’t have the resources and certainly not the required IT systems to track and register our increasingly mobile population. We should call on Parliament through a Speakers Conference to investigate the existing and much more accurate methods of voter registration that exist elsewhere.

Labour needs to let go of the issue of registration and avoid any future campaign to be dismissed as a partisan issue about the number of each party’s MPs. We should also be building a much broader based initiative – a modern day Chartist Movement – to campaign for an accurate franchise. We are facing a reversal of the fundamentals of parliamentary democracy where every eligible vote is of equal value.

Paul Wheeler writes on local politics