Lord Beamish
Main Page: Lord Beamish (Labour - Life peer)
Wayne David
I do not want to go into detail about individual electoral registration. We have expressed our concerns about the process in the past, and I welcome the fact that more and more people want to be on the electoral register and thereby have the ability to vote. It is good for democracy that young people in particular want to be involved in our democratic debate and will cast their vote on 23 June.
Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)
Would not someone have to be a time traveller to vote twice, in their university seat and also at home? The idea that people would go to such lengths is ridiculous.
Wayne David
I reiterate that it is important for us to say categorically what most people realise: in our democracy, if one person has a vote, they should use it on one occasion on polling day. That is abundantly clear.
All who are engaged in the debate hold strong views, but it is vital for democracy that people have the right to cast their vote on 23 June. I therefore warmly welcome the Government’s initiative. It is unfortunate that we have had a technical mishap, but action has been taken. I urge people throughout the length and breadth of this country to take advantage of the opportunity to register to vote and to cast their vote, whichever way they wish to do that, on 23 June. The decision is the most important that this country will make in a generation, and it is therefore vital that everyone who is entitled to vote casts their vote.
Mr Jenkin
My hon. Friend raises a legitimate question, and we should inquire further into it. There should be a fail-safe way of ensuring that someone is who they say they are when they register their vote. At the moment, there is not. If people on the register now who are registered incorrectly are being sent ballot papers, and if it is not due to a software glitch, there is no way of picking it up.
I have urged the Electoral Commission to make more public statements, because the system now has different franchises for different purposes. Why will there not be notices in polling stations? The electoral officer is bound to offer a ballot paper to someone who is on the register, but a “Read this” notice could make it clear that people who are not eligible to vote but who knowingly do so commit a criminal offence.
Mr Kevan Jones
I accept the point about people filling in the application form without declaring that they are an EU citizen, but if they are an EU citizen they will be marked up as such on the register at the polling station. If they were sent a polling card inadvertently, the clerk would know that they were not entitled to vote.
Mr Jenkin
Not if they were misrecorded—that is the point. We need to make people aware of who is eligible to vote. It would be perfectly reasonable for the Electoral Commission and the Government to make more visible public statements to make it clear that if someone has been offered a ballot paper but is not eligible to vote— and knows it—it is an offence to vote. It is as simple as that. I am not asking polling officers to discriminate when the vote takes place; I am simply asking for more clarification and greater public awareness of who is and is not eligible to vote.
Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)
I had thought it a unifying point in the debate that we wanted to get the maximum number of people to vote and to be registered in this campaign. What I have just heard from the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), however, is a typical muddying of the waters that we have seen from the leave campaign, even in respect of the facts that we are dealing with. The hon. Gentleman threw out a figure of 75%—I accept that some people will have re-registered without needing to do so—with no evidence to explain where that estimate came from. We must deal with facts.
We have seen in the press that huge numbers of people who are EU citizens and not entitled to vote have obtained voting cards. If they are getting voting cards, there will be an indication on the registrations that they are EU citizens. The register that officers will tick off will show whether people are EU citizens and unable to vote. This attempt to muddy the waters on the legitimacy of the polling is complete nonsense. Attempting to rubbish this referendum even before it starts and using the sort of highly emotive language that we just heard, suggesting that the electoral process would somehow be questionable for a developed state brings no credit to those arguing such a case and is not at all helpful.
I welcome what the Government have done. The upsurge in those wanting to vote in the referendum has been a problem, but we should celebrate it. It is good that people want to vote in this very important referendum. Unlike with a general election, there is no possibility of a change in five years’ time; this decision will guide the future of our nation for many decades to come.
It must be the first time I have ever agreed with a Liberal Democrat, but I agreed with the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) that we must subsequently have an inquiry into whether the increase in registration should be reflected by the Boundary Commission.
Let me knock on the head the nonsense we have heard about 17-year-olds voting. I have been an election agent and a candidate in many elections, and I have never known an election yet in which somebody has not been on the register who should not have been. It happens; it is human nature. If someone who is 17 has been given a poll card and turns up at the polling station, they will not be allowed to vote because their date of birth will appear next to their name. Let us try to clear away the fog that Members are trying to create by suggesting that the process is somehow illegitimate. I do not know whether they are preparing their excuses for the result post-23 June, but the fact is that long-standing mechanisms are in place.
May I ask the Minister one simple question about postal applications? He said that the deadline would be extended until midnight. Will there be any provision for a councillor or returning officer to obtain the applications from the post office before midnight? In most cases, the last post will be during the day, and we do not want large numbers of postal applications to sit in sorting offices if they could be delivered to the returning officer. Could the returning officer, or councillor, arrange with the post office to collect them later in the day? Even if they were collected at five o’clock, at least people would then be registered.
What has happened is unfortunate, but I must give credit to the Government for coming up with a solution. That brings me back to the main point, which is that we must ensure not only that as many people as possible are registered to vote, but that the turnout is as high as possible on 23 June.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
I think it is worth pointing out that the reason we are having a referendum at all is that the Conservatives won the last general election. All the Opposition Members who are celebrating this massive increase in registration should bear it in mind that none of this would have happened had they formed the Government following the election.
Mr Hollobone
Because the Labour party would not have agreed to a referendum on our membership of the European Union, and we would therefore not have seen more than 2 million extra people registering. The Conservative victory means that we are a healthier democracy than we could ever have been if Labour had won the election.
Mr Hollobone
I am most grateful for that clarification. We have ended up with the right result, even if it is the wrong way round.
I am concerned about an aspect of student voting, although I hope the Minister will tell me that I have got it wrong. It is great that so many young people are signing up to take part in the referendum, and of course many participants on both sides will be very enthusiastic. First-time voters, in particular, may not appreciate a fairly simple point that many other voters do appreciate, which is that even if people are registered twice, they cannot vote twice. There is a serious point to be made here. My understanding is that voting twice is a criminal offence, and that it is the police who investigate it. I think it would be a great shame if students ended up being investigated by the police because, in their enthusiasm and naivety, they voted twice.
Mr Kevan Jones
It is, again, trying to confuse the situation to say that that will create a problem. How could someone who was registered in Durham—other than by means of a postal vote: I must say that before the hon. Gentleman comes back at me with it—vote in two places on the same date? That is not possible.
There is another point which the hon. Gentleman and other Members have missed completely. When people walk into a polling station, they see a long list of dos and don’ts, and the don’ts include voting twice.
Mr Hollobone
There is a long list of dos and don’ts, but no one reads it, because the type is so small and the notice is so big. It looks like what it is, a load of legalese about the correct procedures. The hon. Gentleman is an experienced Member of the House and an experienced politician, and he knows about democratic procedures. The serious point that I am making—not from a vote leave standpoint, or indeed from a remain standpoint—is that there will be hundreds of thousands of first-time voters who do not understand registration, and because they realise that they can register at the last minute, they have done so. What I want to avoid is police investigations afterwards because students have made a silly mistake.
Mr Jones
The hon. Gentleman has no evidence whatsoever that this will be a big problem. He is obviously trying to get a headline into tomorrow’s Daily Mail. As an experienced candidate and an experienced election agent, I can tell him that anyone who is unclear about the rules can always ask the poll clerks, who will explain the process of voting.
Mr Hollobone
I am sure that no students in Durham will be affected by this potential anomaly.
Matt Warman
The right hon. Gentleman read my mind.
Although there are many Members across the House who think that online voting is inevitable, it is crucial that, in a world where we cannot get voting in person right in some parts of the country in the 21st century, we conduct sensible small-scale trials of online voting.
Mr Kevan Jones
Does the hon. Gentleman recall that in 2004 the Labour Government did a trial of all postal voting, e-voting and other things. It was commended by the Electoral Commission. It was his party and others who argued that fraud could be endemic, and that was why the trial was not taken any further.
Matt Warman
I agree that trials have taken place and that they were a good thing, but they did also demonstrate that the system was not perfect. I do not think that anyone who looked at those trials, which were 12 years ago and which did not use the technology that we would now use, would say that they should have been rolled out across the whole country, because they were not as robust as we would have liked them to be. None the less, it remains the case that online voting is inevitable given the direction in which this country is going. We should look carefully at what that means, but, given the experience of the past 24 to 48 hours, let us bear in mind that if we get things wrong, we risk not only further undermining people’s faith in democracy, but putting ourselves in a position where even fewer people than now would vote, and that would be bad for all of us.
Although I welcome many of the things that we have seen over the past 24 to 48 hours, I urge the Government to seize the opportunity to extend the registration deadline closer to the period of an election or a referendum, to demonstrate the real appetite of people to use the web to get involved in democracy, and to begin those trials into online voting so that we can, over however many years it takes, get to a point where people can use the web to cast their vote and increase turnout overall.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That the draft European Union Referendum (Voter Registration) Regulations 2016, which were laid before this House on 8 June, be approved.