A Question Of Identity

In this week's Queen's Speech, Her Majesty announced that her Government (and I suspect that she would rather they were not her Government), intended to introduce legislation that would require voters to produce photographic ID at Polling Stations in order to vote at general elections and English local elections. Predictably, this provoked much opposition on the twin grounds that it was a “blatant attempt by the Tories to rig the result of the next general election," (Cat Smith, Shadow Minister for Voter Engagement and Youth Affairs), and that it would disenfranchise thousands of people, because, as Darren Hughes of the Electoral Reform Society (ERS), said “these plans will leave tens of thousands of legitimate voters voiceless”.

According to The Independent, a Cabinet Office spokeswoman said: "Electoral fraud is an unacceptable crime that strikes at a core principle of our democracy." But, isn't potentially disenfranchising thousands of people even more of a threat to democracy? The answer really depends on how much of a problem electoral fraud actually is. Personation - that is 'assuming the identity of another (person) in order to deceive' - at the ballot box is extremely rare; during 2017 there were 336 cases of alleged electoral fraud and only one of those was for personation at a Polling Station, while there were two for a similar offence relating to postal votes. While the majority of alleged offenses resulted in no action being taken, in 165 cases where action was necessary, these were all alleged campaign frauds, and nothing do do with voters.

Cynics might say that these low numbers do not prove that there is little or no electoral fraud, as there are (obviously) no numbers for how many frauds have been successful and undetected. The Metropolitan Police's much criticised investigation into electoral fraud in Tower Hamlets in 2014, following which former mayor Luftur Rahman was found guilty of corrupt and illegal practices, suggests that we should take these figures as advisory rather than absolute. Nonetheless, they do imply that the scale of the problem is minuscule and that the Government's proposals are taking the proverbial sledgehammer to a microscopic nut.

One might imagine that assessing the scale of the problem vis a vis voters potentially disenfranchised by requiring them to produce photo ID at Polling Stations would be difficult, but it is actually easier than one might imagine. In 2015, the Electoral Commission said that about 3.5 million electors did not have an acceptable form of photo ID, and in May this year, a trial at local elections in ten areas across the country where voters were required to produce photo ID found that 819 people were turned away from Polling Stations for a lack of such ID. None of the 819 subsequently returned to vote. The net result is that in a limited number of constituencies, at one election, the number of people unable to vote for lack of photo ID was more than double the number of cases of electoral fraud in the whole of 2017, and more than 270 times the number of instances of personation in that year.

It's not compulsory to take a dog to a Polling Station...

 

...but in Northern Ireland you need one of these, or something similar.

On the face of it, those numbers suggest that requiring voters to produce photo ID - especially when so many people have none - is deeply undemocratic since the risk of fraud is so greatly outweighed by the risk of disenfranchisement. To mitigate that risk, however there are proposals that anyone lacking photographic ID would be able to apply for a free document proving their identity. This is already the case in Northern Ireland, where along with the usual form of photo ID that can be used - passport, driving licence, bus or rail pass, among others - the local Electoral Office issues an electoral identity card, which serves the dual purpose of authenticating voters and providing proof of age when the holder wishes to buy age restricted products such as alcohol and tobacco. This scheme was introduced in 2002 and has improved public confidence in the electoral process and reduced instances of suspected electoral fraud. The number of registered voters in Northern Ireland declined in 2002, with the number of voters turned away because someone had already voted in their name, and of people voting under more than one name both falling. This certainly suggests that requiring photo ID reduces risk of fraud, but that may only be because the instances of fraud were higher in Northern Ireland than those on the mainland in the first place.

Compulsory - or even voluntary - identity cards are something that, in general, the British public views with some suspicion. The Identity Cards Act of 2006 proposed a national identity card that would serve as a personal identification document and European Union travel document. There were objections on the grounds of cost, effectiveness, and data protection. Given the amount of data that would have been harvested and subsequently stored in the associated National Identity Register (NIR), and especially in view of successive government's track record on major IT projects, these concerns were probably well-founded. The scheme died a slow death and the Identity Cards Act was repealed in 2010 and the NIR database destroyed.

While photo ID may not be compulsory in the UK (yet), life without it can be inconvenient at best. If you want to rent a flat, apply for a job, open a bank account, or take a domestic flight, you'll need photo ID, and apart from buying an alcoholic drink, many pubs and most clubs now want photo ID just to get through the door.  And, if like me, you want to go to the BBC to see a radio show recorded, you'll need photo ID for that too.

In England and Wales, 76% of the population hold a passport.

If - and it's a big if, given the fact that we currently have a minority Government and a General Election within the coming months is quite probable - legislation passes to require voter ID, I would seriously hope that all of the 3.5 million people lacking such ID apply immediately for whatever state-issued ID the Government proposes, and for two reasons. Firstly - and obviously - to prevent those people from being disenfranchised, and thereby allay fears of any future election being 'rigged' (beyond the not unreasonable concern that campaign methods might be achieving that outcome anyway, although that is a whole different bouilloire de poisson), and secondly to watch the carnage as an under-prepared government department using an inadequate IT system goes into complete meltdown trying to cope with a tsunami of applications.