Rishi Sunak has defended new laws requiring voters to bring ID as “entirely reasonable” after Jacob Rees-Mogg suggested the move was designed to gerrymander election results in favour of the Tories.
Sunak said he was “very comfortable” with controversial rules following Rees-Mogg’s critical comments and reports that thousands of people were turned away from polling stations at the local elections in May.
Rees-Mogg, a former business secretary, last week suggested that the policy had backfired on the Tories as a result of trying to suppress the votes of people unlikely to back them.
“Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them, as, dare I say, we found by insisting on voter ID for elections,” he told the National Conservatism conference last week. “We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they, by and large, voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well.”
It comes after a group of election observers, Democracy Volunteers, found that more than 1% of voters, half of whom appeared to be from minority ethnic backgrounds, were turned away from polling stations because of ID requirements at the local elections.
A further report by the BBC found 160 of 230 councils that held elections showed 26,165 voters were initially denied ballot papers at polling stations. Of these, 16,588 people came back with valid ID while 9,577 did not return. However, campaigners have said this might not capture the full picture as some people will have been turned away by election “greeters” before they got to the point of asking for a ballot paper.
Speaking on the way to the G7 summit in Japan, the prime minister dismissed critics of the policy, saying it was justified and proportionate.
Asked about Rees-Mogg’s suggestion of gerrymandering, Sunak said: “These laws, the Labour government put them in place for Northern Ireland when they were in office, point one. Point two, they’re used in tons of other countries across Europe and indeed Canada. Point three, 98% of people already possessed one of the forms of ID that were eligible and, for those that didn’t have one, they could apply for a free voter ID. Those are all the facts that make me think it is an entirely reasonable thing to do in line with lots of other countries, including in Northern Ireland, which the Labour government did. Also, I think it is an entirely reasonable thing that there is integrity in our voting system. That’s my general view on that.”
Sunak said the Electoral Commission will evaluate and publish findings on the impact of voter ID requirements on the local elections, but added: “In general, I’m very comfortable about the approach that we’ve taken.”
The PM also rejected the idea of extending the vote to 16-year-olds and EU citizens who have lived in the UK for decades, a policy that Labour is considering for inclusion in its manifesto.
“Our position on that hasn’t changed. I think that voting is a privilege. We have a set of rules in place about who is eligible to vote. And we have no plans to change that,” Sunak said.
