EU Referendum: Voter Registration
Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Mike Weir
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.
Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)
This is not a new issue. The registers for the Scottish Parliament elections and the local government elections are different from that for the UK general election. We had elections for the Scottish Parliament about a year after the Westminster general election, but the problem highlighted by the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) did not arise—there was not a great deal of confusion. I suspect that the hon. Gentleman is making a mountain out of a molehill.
Mr Jenkin
If the wrong people are able to vote, it is not making a mountain out of a molehill. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would not want the wrong people to vote, so I am surprised that he does not want the public to have the information that they should have.
The matter before us should not have arisen. It reflects a lack of adaptation, because individual registration has enormously increased the pressure on systems to cope with the problem. The Government were warned by the Electoral Commission and the Public Administration Committee, as it then was, about the consequences of rushing forward with individual registration, however desirable it was. There was a lack of foresight. The Government agreed to spend millions of pounds on promoting registration in the run-up to this poll. Perhaps they should have used publicity to clarify that people did not have to re-register if they were already on the register. As my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) rightly noted, and as the Minister confirmed, a great number of people registered to vote in this referendum when they were already on the register—perhaps up to 75% of those applying. That is one reason why the system has become clogged up. People have not clearly understood that if they are already on the register, they do not need to re-register. We need to learn from that.
Let us be clear about the consequences. A requirement to change the law when a poll for postal voters has effectively already opened is highly irregular. If this happened in some fledgling democracy in the former Soviet Union or in Africa, what would the observers say about the conduct of the poll? This is a really unpleasant precedent to set in our system, which should be one of the finest democracies in the world. The fact that Ministers have spent so much talking to lawyers underlines the point I made yesterday that this is on the cusp of legality. We are on the edge of what is acceptable. I do not for a moment believe that there will be a legitimate challenge, but the fact that we have to consult lawyers in such detail and so carefully to get this right underlines the pickle that we are in as a result of this lack of foresight and lack of care.
More pressure is being placed on electoral returning officers and electoral administrators. I have heard anecdotally from one authority that “we are near breaking-point”. There are record numbers of postal votes, record numbers of registrations, record numbers of proxies in a massive national poll, on which so much is hanging. The pressure is on them, and this adds to that pressure. We should be mindful of that, thank them for their incredible commitment, which makes our democracy run so smoothly most of the time and wish them well in their tasks.
I extend my best wishes, too, to the Electoral Commission. I and others have criticised it, but it is doing its best under very difficult circumstances. There may be lessons to learn about the future of the Electoral Commission and the future role of the Cabinet Office when we conduct our inquest into this referendum.