Challenging Voter ID nonsense

Despite standing down as Leader of Crawley Borough Council last May, I remain a member of the council and in order to continue contributing to its work I was appointed Chair of the Governance Committee.

Governance isn’t the most interesting of the committees, but as it’s responsible for setting the rules around how the council operates and overseeing the running of elections, its work is important. For around a year now, we’ve been considering the implications of the Election Act and how best to ensure that we can continue to deliver effective elections, despite the various anti-democratic measures it contains.

The leading one of these measures is a requirement that people bring along photo ID when they go to vote and on the surface this may seem reasonable. The problem is that while the majority of us have access to such ID, there are still large numbers who do not and who will first discover that they have lost their ability to vote when they visit a polling station. The Government claims that only 2% of the public lack access to valid ID, but even if we put aside the idea that removing the ability to vote from a million UK electors is just inherently wrong, that figure isn’t actually accurate.

I chaired the working group tasked with deciding local government’s response to the Elections Bill. Clearly, as local authorities are elected we had reason to feel strongly about its provisions, but more importantly as we would have to administer them we needed to ensure that the final proposals were viable to implement and the stories now coming out about lack of preparedness from councils are due to the Government failing much of what our working group suggested. Unfortunately, despite unanimous cross-party agreement between the members of the working group the current Conservative Chair of the Local Government Association suppressed our findings and consequently there was no local government response to the legislation. To be frank, so long as Cllr James Jamieson remains in office, local government has no voice.

However, as chair of the working group, I went through the bill and its supporting evidence in detail, including finding the report the 2% assessment is based upon, which made two things clear. First, the report authors dedicated a whole page to explaining why their figures might not be accurate and essentially under-count those very groups less likely to have ID. Secondly, their research looked at whether people had any form of ID, not just those listed in the Act.

This point is crucial, because not all forms of Voter ID are acceptable. In fact, there is a clear bias in the legislation towards those types most likely to be held by older voters amongst which the Conservative Party tends to do better at election time. Meanwhile, the people least likely to have valid ID are young, poor or BAME, all groups more likely to vote for the Labour Party. Can anyone guess why the measure was brought in?

Well, that brings me back to Monday’s Governance meeting, where in a response to the long-term financial costs for the council of having to implement the new measure solving a problem which does not actually exist, the Conservatives said that we didn’t know whether or not it exists. This is where I stepped in, because I’m getting tired of this nonsense being trotted out every time the measure comes up.

There are indeed clear markers of where fraud occurs and where it does not. To undertake personation, you need to be clear that someone isn’t going to use their vote, so as to not be caught out. This in itself isn’t easy. Marked registers indicate where someone has been issued with a ballot paper at an election and parties are entitled to copies of these as part of measures to ensure that fraud has not taken place. From these we know that although General Election turnouts tend to be below 70% and local elections below 40%, the actual number of ‘non-voters’ or people who never vote is actually very low, with much of the electorate instead being irregular voters. People who turn out to some but not all contests. You do not know if that contest is the contest where that individual is going to vote or not. A series of such events won’t go unnoticed and unreported.

But, say you are there first and get to vote, then the actual elector comes in. In those circumstances, the individual is issued with a different type of ballot paper. These have a different colour and are stored separately, essentially forming evidence that the process has gone wrong if the matter goes to an election court. Returning officers take these votes very seriously, even one is considered a major failure and we never at any borough-wide election ever get more than one or two. Were you to get more than this it would be a sign of voter fraud and the matter would most likely end up in an election court, potentially forcing the contest to be re-run.

As an offside, your vote isn’t a secret ballot when it comes to an election court. Every ballot has a serial number on the back and if the court orders it they can identify which ballots were cast by those people claiming to be someone else and to check whether that would have affected the result compared to those put aside. This has never happened in the history of our town. I can find no record of it happening anywhere

Okay, so, so far, you might be caught by trying to be someone who has already voted, or we might know that there has been fraud due to people finding out that their vote has already been used. But, what happens if someone undertakes personation and no one comes to vote afterwards. Well, that person would get away with voting for someone else, but would that actually make a difference? While it’s theoretically possible, very few votes are so close that a single vote would change it, for most constituencies you are going to need thousands of votes to change the final result.

Even hitting up every polling station in town, you are going to need around a hundred people to make their way to every polling station with you and each correctly picking a consistent non-voter without being caught, to achieve that kind of outcome. True, local elections are won by smaller margins, but they also have fewer polling stations, so the ratio is much the same. The reality is that even if you could achieve all of this, someone will always talk, even if it’s just to tell their spouse or best friend. No secret can survive those numbers knowing.

But, for a minute let’s suppose that they could. Well, the only way to do it effectively would be to have sufficient historical copies of marked registers to be able to identify for certain those who wouldn’t vote and to have access to a large enough group of people to use those votes. Not only does that almost certainly limit us to one of the two major parties, but given how close the actual result would need to be, it would mean that we would need to be prepared to jeopardise a marginal seat through mass voter fraud which would see our entire activist base facing jail time. Frankly, with the resources available, you would be much better doing what we actually do, and sending activists round on the day persuading supporters to go out and vote. The number of voters each activist can reach on the day is in the hundreds, why jeopardise getting out a potentially far higher number of votes by undertaking a fraud at that scale you would almost certainly be caught committing?

So, we can say that the likelihood that any candidate has ever won a constituency in the modern history of UK elections through personation is as close to zero as you can get. Impossible, no. But, then again, it’s not impossible that someone could fake an ID and vote using your name this May and, of course, postal votes (overwhelmingly held by a demographic most likely to vote Conservative) don’t require any ID at all. Yet, from now on, to prevent something which has never happened and would in all probability always result in the decision being overturned by an election court, we are about to prevent a million people from voting. Apparently, that’s what democracy means according to our current generation of Conservative MPs.