The dust is settling on Thursday’s local elections and most votes have now been counted. But one of the big stories of last week is not the results of the vote, but about the process of voting itself.
For the first time, voters in England who headed to the polls needed to bring with them photographic ID. Accepted forms of ID included passports, driving licences, 60+ Oyster cards (but not the 18+ student ones) and some bus passes.
Since before these new rules became law, we were warning about the dangers of voter ID, the risks it poses to our elections and the absence of any evidence that “personation” – the type of electoral fraud these rules seek to address – is a widespread problem across the country.
The government’s own research suggests that around 2 million voters in the UK may lack the kind of photographic ID needed to cast a vote under these rules – many of whom are already among society’s most marginalised. Even after the launch of the government’s free voter authority certificate, for which there were just 85,000 applications before last month’s deadline, a significant number of people are still without the means to cast their ballot.
It’s too early to know the full extent of the impact of these new rules on last week’s elections but the picture emerging is not good. Across the country, there were examples of voters being turned away from the polling station – denied their democratic right to cast a ballot.
As polls closed, the independent Electoral Commission, the body tasked with regulating our elections, released a statement noting that while the elections were well run, “the ID requirement posed a greater challenge for some groups in society, and … some people were regrettably unable to vote today as a result”.
At the Electoral Reform Society, we had voters contact us sharing their stories of being denied a ballot. People alleged that they had been turned away for having the wrong ID, or the right ID but in the wrong format, or ID using their maiden name rather than their married name. Some had struggled to get a voter certificate; some had not gone to vote as a result.
We may never get the full picture of how many people were caught out by these new rules. To be properly recorded in the evaluation process you needed to get as far as the desk in the polling station and request a ballot. Anyone who realised they didn’t have the right ID in the queue, saw signs outside as they approached or even those advised on the new rules by greeters outside the polling station will have gone uncounted. That’s before you even begin to tally those who, aware of these new rules, just didn’t make the journey to begin with.
Let’s be clear: if these rules were to be applied to a general election – where millions more voters from across the country will be voting – the outcome is likely to be far, far worse.
But it’s not too late for the government to change course. This policy could and should be repealed. In 2019, the last year these elections were held, there was just one conviction for personation – across 58m ballots cast in three elections On Thursday, just one council – Maidstone – reported 20 times that number being turned away and not coming back. Voter ID always has been a solution in search of a problem.
Many of the stories we heard were of voters trying to use IDs that are acceptable in many other areas of life – from a police officer who was told their warrant card (government-issued photographic ID that proves their powers as a police officer) wasn’t acceptable, to a nurse whose NHS-issued photo ID was deemed insufficient by polling station staff. This suggests that expanding the list of acceptable IDs, including non-photographic ID and even poll cards, as we and many others have called for, could prevent many voters from being turned away.
We also heard stories of people turning up to vote with a family member where one of them had ID and the other was turned away. In these situations, a simple vouching scheme, as used in Canada, would enable the voter with ID to vouch for the identity of the voter without.
Ministers rejected both these ideas when the policy was debated in parliament. As a result, we now have one of the most restrictive voter ID regimes – far more restrictive than many US states, where election rules are regularly used to suppress voter turnout for political gain.
For the UK, it’s not too late. Ministers have committed to reviewing the impact of the policy after these elections. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll get data and analysis that will provide a fuller (if not complete) picture of the impact of these rules on our democracy.
This review is a chance to think again about voter ID, which itself poses a more significant risk to free and fair elections in the UK than the problem it’s claimed to fix.
Jess Garland is director of research and policy at the Electoral Reform Society
