Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office, how many convictions of voter personation in general elections there have been in the 21st Century.

The forthcoming Elections Bill will have a package of measures to tackle different types of electoral fraud – including personation in polling stations, postal voting personation and interference, proxy voting fraud, intimidation and undue influence.

Voter fraud is a crime that we cannot allow room for, so the Government is stamping out any potential for it to take place in elections, in line with our manifesto pledge.

The Electoral Commission publishes electoral fraud data on its website: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/our-views-and-research/our-research/electoral-fraud-data.

Personation in polling stations is very difficult to identify and prove: by definition, it is a crime of deception. The 2015 Tower Hamlets election court judgment found that personation was one of the interlinked types of corrupt and illegal practices that took place.

By contrast, as the Electoral Commission has previously noted: ‘Since the introduction of photo ID in Northern Ireland there have been no reported cases of personation. Voters’ confidence that elections are well-run in Northern Ireland is consistently higher than in Great Britain, and there are virtually no allegations of electoral fraud at polling stations’ (December 2015).