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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Heather Stewart

MPs fiddled with voter ID as electoral data security burned

An electronic noticeboard in Reading reminds people to bring photo ID when they vote in the 4 May local elections.
The ID rules were said to have been introduced to protect elections against the threat of voter impersonation. Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/Shutterstock

It turns out that while Conservative ministers were spending hours of parliamentary time in 2021-22 introducing requirements for voters to produce ID at polling stations – to protect elections against a threat most experts believed was negligible – the Electoral Commission was being hacked by “hostile actors”.

These hackers, who have not been identified and whose motivations are unclear, were able to access the data, such as home addresses, of millions of voters, many of whom choose not to make that information publicly available.

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