Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between David Davis and Chloe Smith

Thursday 27th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

2. Whether his Department has made an assessment of the extent to which the use of voter identification will tackle voter fraud.

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Chloe Smith)]

The Government are committed to introducing voter ID, as well as extra postal and proxy voting measures, to reduce the potential for electoral fraud in order to give the public greater confidence that our elections are secure. Evaluation by the Electoral Commission and the Cabinet Office of the pilots we ran shows that they were a success, and that public confidence in the electoral system was higher in the areas involved.

[Mr Davis]

The Minister will be unsurprised to hear that I am unimpressed by this illiberal idea. The Electoral Commission says that fraud relating to proxy voting, postal voting, bribery, undue influence or tampering with ballot papers, on which voter ID will have no effect, accounts for three quarters of electoral fraud, so what are we doing about that?

[Chloe Smith]

As I mentioned, we are looking at a range of measures, including ways to improve the security of postal and proxy voting. It is important to recognise that electoral fraud in any form is a crime, which is why we should stand by measures to deal with it. We should be on the side of the victims of that crime, whose voices are taken away—indeed, stolen—by such fraud. That is a good reason why this was in our manifesto, on which, I gently remind my right hon. Friend, we both stood.