Critics say the Conservative government’s new requirements are meant to discourage voting by young people and members of minority groups, who are likely to be Labour voters.
The rituals around voting have changed little for decades in Britain, where electors give their names and addresses to polling station staff, are checked off a list and then handed a paper ballot to mark and cast in a box.
But on Thursday a new requirement will be added for those choosing thousands of elected representatives for municipalities in England: proof of identity.
And while voters in many countries take that obligation for granted, the move has unleashed a political storm in Britain.
Critics claim the change could reduce turnout, discourage young people from voting and disenfranchise some minority voters and others who are less likely to have a passport or driver’s license.
Requiring proof of ID could deter people either from going out to vote or from actually doing so if the new checks lead to long delays at polling stations, they say.
And one quirk of the new system that has particularly incensed the critics is a concession allowing some older people to use as ID the cards that entitle them to free or reduced-fee travel, while preventing younger folk to use their travel cards in the same way.
Given that older voters are statistically more likely than the young both to vote and to support the Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, some opposition politicians fear a finger on the scales. The leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, accused the government of “undermining our democracy.”
Even one senior Conservative lawmaker, David Davis, has reservations. “The introduction of Voter ID has been shown to reduce turnout. This is bad for our democracy,” he wrote on Twitter.
A similar push has proved contentious in parts of the United States. Several states where Republicans control the legislature and the governor’s seat have introduced new identification requirements as well as broader voting restrictions.
But in Britain the furor also reflects the country’s longstanding resistance to identity cards, which are a common feature in many of its continental European neighbors.
A 2005 effort by Prime Minister Tony Blair to introduce national identity cards was abandoned in the face of staunch opposition. (Mr. Blair still urges their adoption, although now in digital form.)
Britons did carry identity cards during World War II, though they were abandoned in 1952 after a famous case in which Clarence Willcock, a dry cleaner from north London, refused to show documentation to a police officer who pulled over his car. When the matter came to court, a judge ruled in Mr. Willcock’s favor.
Acceptable documents for modern-day voters will include a driver’s license or passport, and the government says it is simply following standard practice in most Western nations to protect the integrity of the electoral system.
An official survey found that 96 percent of the electorate held a form of ID with a photo that respondents thought was still recognizable. That number fell to 91 percent when including only those with ID cards that had not expired.
Those who lack the necessary documentation could apply for a new form of photo ID that the government calls a voter authority certificate.
However, there were just 85,689 applications for those cards, representing 4.3 percent of the estimated two million people who did not have valid photo ID, according to openDemocracy, an independent media platform that focuses on the political process.
In requiring proof of identity, the government is offering a solution to a nonexistent problem, critics say. The Electoral Commission, the independent body that governs elections in Britain, said that in recent years there had been “no evidence of large-scale electoral fraud.”
Of the 1,386 suspected cases reported to police between 2018 and 2022, nine led to convictions and six cautions were issued. In most instances, officers either took no further action or resolved the matter locally, it said.
Critics fear that any barrier to participation in the electoral process will particularly affect minority groups. Clive Lewis, a Labour lawmaker, argued that those people already felt excluded from the political process, adding that “voter ID will make it even harder for marginalized groups to vote.”
And a parliamentary committee noted “the widely voiced concerns about the potential impact of the introduction of mandatory voter ID on certain societal groups and for some with protected characteristics, including people with disabilities, members of LGBTQ+ communities, Black and ethnic minority groups and older people.”
Questioned in Parliament on Wednesday, Mr. Sunak said that a voter ID requirement was “common in European countries, it’s common in Canada and it’s absolutely right that we introduce it here too.”
John Curtice, a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said most countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development would expect people to show ID when they vote, as they must in Northern Ireland, where rules were introduced to deal with voting irregularities there.
“From an international perspective you could say you should be doing it. From a domestic perspective the issue is, what’s the problem?” he said, noting that few cases of electoral fraud had been successfully prosecuted.
Professor Curtice added that some categories of acceptable identification “look a little curious,” in particular the use of travel cards by older people.
Ideally, such changes should have been made on a cross-party basis with the agreement of opposition politicians, he said.
Another risk is that turning away voters who fail to provide valid ID could spark disputes, perhaps raising the suspicions about the fairness of election results that they were designed to allay. That is most likely in municipal elections, where turnouts tend to be low and just a handful of votes can decide the outcome of some contests.
As to the likely scale of any impact, Professor Curtice said it was hard to predict.
“The honest answer is that we don’t know and that we may never know,” he said, “unless there is an enormous drop in turnout, and that is particularly in places where fewer people have passports.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
