It may have passed you by that last week was Welcome to Your Vote week, encouraging sixth-formers to get excited about a vote denied to them. “We want to show young people that politics and democracy impacts everything around them,” says the Electoral Commission. Yes, indeed it does. But don’t tell them that even when they turn 18, only a few hundred thousand votes in marginal seats will swing the next election – because the system is a fix, where a postcode lottery decides the few who own the golden votes under our warped first-past-the-post electoral system.
When young people do go to vote, this government tries to deter them by demanding photo ID at the polling station. What kind? Oh, not the kind young voters have. Young people’s travel passes have been deliberately excluded, while old people’s bus passes are just fine. The usually reticent chair of the Electoral Commission, John Pullinger, former chief statistician of immense civil service heft, protests loudly these days. His commission’s key recommendations were ignored in the Elections Act, including this “very, very tight” list of permissible IDs, that can “disenfranchise particular people”, he told the Financial Times.
