The voter ID requirement remains just one out of a series of poorly devised policies the recently elected Labour government should abandon.
Labour were right to allow themselves a moment of self-indulgence on election night. But the celebratory mood didn’t last long, and Starmer’s government is now making good progress in undoing some of the more obvious policy failings of the Conservatives. Progress has been made in public sector pay, and in reversing the nonsensical ban on on-shore wind farms.
But as of today, Labour has had little to say on the Conservative voter ID requirement. Combining the policy’s potential to cause damage by restricting turnout, as well as its low salience, makes overturning the ID requirement an easy policy win for the Labour Party.
Voter ID: Fixing a Non-Existent Problem
The innocuously named Elections Bill (2022), ostensibly honours the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto commitment to ‘’protect the integrity of our democracy’’. The bill itself received royal assent in April 2022, having first been introduced to Parliament in July of the previous year. While not officially part of the campaign to save Boris Johnson that would follow in the coming months, the policy shares several characteristics with the measures that were introduced as part of ‘Operation Save Big Dog’.
Take for instance the government’s policy for dealing with small boat crossings in the Channel by deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. The policy is intended to act as a deterrent but serves only as a gimmick. It’s just another in a series of policies designed not to tackle the problem at hand, but instead fan the flames of a right-wing culture war.
The voter ID bill works in a similar though different way. Whereas with the Rwanda policy the Conservatives took a genuine crisis and fabricated a solution, with their voter ID requirements the problem never existed in the first place. Instances of voter fraud are vanishingly rare. The UK 2019 general election saw just 595 allegations of voter fraud, with just five of these cases leading to a conviction. When compared with the number of actual voters in 2019, which stood at just over 32 million, these voter fraud numbers appear not just negligible, but borderline non-existent.
Never let facts get in the way of a good story
If voter fraud is such a rarity, what exactly is the need for protecting the integrity of British elections? Kemi Badenoch, the then Minister of State at the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, seemed unable to answer this most basic of questions. In a 2022 policy paper, data from the ground on the number of actual instances of voter fraud is sparse, replaced instead with innuendo and hyperbole. Throughout the paper, Badenoch alludes to a nefarious band of impersonators but can’t quantify their existence.
Luckily for us, regulators such as the Electoral Commission do collect important data points on voter fraud as well as the impact of government policy on turnout. The independent watchdog undertook an analysis of the impact voter ID requirements had on the local elections in May 2023. Their findings tell an all too familiar story. Non-white voters from deprived areas with high levels of unemployment were more likely to be turned away for not having the necessary ID than white voters in more prosperous constituencies. Of the 14,000 voters estimated through survey data to have been turned away in those local elections last year, a disproportionate number were from minority ethnic backgrounds.
Mirroring America?
Parallels with America are often fraught with caricature, but in this instance, the comparison is an important one to draw. US state legislatures have the right to draw congressional maps and set their voting requirements. It ensures that America’s democracy is beset by problems of gerrymandering (the process of redrawing congressional boundaries in a cynically partisan way), as well overly austere voting restrictions that disproportionately impact voters from minority ethnic backgrounds.
To be clear, the UK doesn’t yet suffer from the issue of partisanship in elections to the extent that America does. Re-drawing constituency boundaries doesn’t fall within the remit of government. It is instead delegated to four separate independent commissions in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. But this independence shouldn’t be taken for granted, especially in an era of burgeoning support for radical-right populist parties in Europe and a Republican party in America hell-bent on restricting access to the franchise.
Voter ID fans the flames of populism
Political scientist Cas Mudde, an expert on the radical right in Europe and America, argues that the danger radical-right populist parties pose lies not only in the politics of division they espouse but also in their rejection of the kinds of constitutional checks and balances that underpin liberal democracies. While it would be churlish to describe the Conservatives as belonging to Europe’s radical right, this doesn’t mean they haven’t adopted any of their tendencies.
The introduction of voter ID is populism at its worst. One of the manifestations of populist fervour is a desire to create new frontiers of social conflict, as the data on voter ID revealed. Aspects of political life once enjoyed an existence independent from the rancour that so often typifies parliamentary discourse. Now under the guise of popular sovereignty, these aspects are brought into the fray and seen as legitimate avenues for confrontation. Policies surrounding elections once enjoyed such independence. Now the sacrosanct act of voting itself has been cynically thrust into the culture war arena.
What next?
Labour’s recent landslide victory is a welcome one. It brings to an end 14 years of Conservative rule that, to put it mildly, left much to be desired. The victory may turn out to be only pyrrhic in nature though should they fail to properly stand up to an emerging threat on the populist right. Reform UK’s five MPs may come across in the chamber as little more than a small, parochial clique of rabble-rousers, but their message and arguments hold sway over a chunk of the population that dwarfs their rather limited numbers in Parliament. The Voter ID requirement is just one in a series of ill-thought-out policies that Keir Starmer’s government has had to inherit. Labour can start the fight back against the populist right by scrapping this unnecessary and harmful policy.
