Elections: Multiple Voting

Lord Beith Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, it is very important to mark the Grenfell tragedy in which 72 lives were lost—the largest loss of life in a residential fire since the Second World War. As the noble Lord knows, with his background in local government, we have a system of electoral registration officers—EROs—who know their patch very well, and they go out and do great work in terms of expanding voter registration. This is very much a locally led matter; we have not looked to centralise the electoral registration process.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, neither an identity card nor any other form of identification takes away the problem that there is no data collected on the extent of multiple registration. In the absence of such data, it cannot be monitored. Moreover, the figures given for whether there was a high or a low poll do not make any sense at all, because in a constituency with a large number of people who are registered elsewhere, it would be quite impossible to gain the 80% or 85% poll that I had when I was first elected to Parliament.