House of Commons - Constitutional Affairs

Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs Written Evidence

Memorandum by MigrationWatch UK (VOT 19)

SUMMARY

1. Checks on the right to vote in Great Britain are virtually non-existent. In particular, there are no checks on the immigration status of those seeking to register. This situation undermines the integrity and credibility of the democratic process.

2. Recommendations by the Electoral Commission in May 2003, including the adoption of a system of individual registration, require urgent action.

3. The right of Commonwealth citizens to vote in British elections is an anachronism that should be removed. It could now enfranchise as many as a quarter of a million non-British citizens.

The Right to Vote in the United Kingdom

4. In addition to United Kingdom citizens, the UK voting system entitles the following categories of people to vote in all elections held in the UK:

5. Citizens of other EU countries may vote in European Parliamentary and Local elections. This is provided for by the terms of the UK's membership of the EC/EU. Members of the armed forces, British Crown servants and British council employees may also apply to be included on the Register of Electors.

6. The entitlement to vote is reciprocated for UK citizens in a small number of (mainly West Indian) countries: Antigua & Barbuda; Dominica; Grenada; Guyana; Jamaica; Mauritius; St. Lucia and St. Vincent & The Grenadines.

Weaknesses in the Present System of Registration

7. There is no standard for making checks on the citizenship/immigration status of people applying to be included on the Electoral Register. As Christopher Leslie MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Constitutional Affairs, has said; "it is true that the registration system is largely based on trust".[44] This makes it vulnerable to error and abuse at a time when turnout at general elections has reached record lows. [45]Public confidence in the security of the registration system is essential to the drive to strengthen participation in the UK's democratic process.

8. There are a number of reasons why ineligible people may be registered to vote:

— The person completing the form may lack the knowledge, education or expertise to complete the registration form correctly leading, for example, to the inclusion of children on the Electoral Register.

— The person completing the form may lack sufficient understanding of the English language to complete the form correctly.

— The person completing the form may know that they are ineligible to vote, but seek to get onto the Register for the purpose of obtaining a credit card, parking permit etc, as the Register is used by many organisations as a database for verifying an applicant's address.

— Someone may wish to register a false name in order to legitimise a false identity and add a cover for illegal activities, such as benefit fraud.

— False names may be added to the Register for the purpose of ballot rigging.

The Recommendations of the Electoral Commission

9. In its report on the electoral process, Voting for Change, of June 2003, the Electoral Commission said:

10. The Commission's central recommendation was that the existing system of household registration, a throwback to the time when the franchise was based on property ownership, be changed to one of individual registration:

11. These recommendations had already been made by the Electoral Commission in another report, The Electoral Registration Process, published in May 2003.

12. It has been suggested that legislation be introduced to provide for checks by Electoral Registration Officers. As the Electoral Commission has pointed out, however; "it would be difficult to decide on what criteria these should be instigated and made . . . if such checks were done on the basis of the appearance or sound of names, such action could well be deemed to be racist and in breach of the law".[48] A move to individual registration, coupled with identifiers, would be more thorough, more equitable and easier to introduce than such checks.

13. The Electoral Commission has also made the following, major recommendations:

— It should become an offence for an individual to fail to supply information to the Electoral Registration Officer or to supply false information (currently there is only a more limited offence of failing to comply with an Officer's request or giving false information at the annual canvass—this applies chiefly to the person completing the form on behalf of the "household").

— Electoral Registration Officers should be able to investigate objections to registration at any time, where reasonable grounds for an objection are specified (currently, there is a 5-day limit to the submission of objections after an application is received by the Officer—public knowledge of the process is low and, especially in the case of applications through rolling registration, members of the public are highly unlikely to have any idea when the 5-day period commences, thus rendering effective objection impossible).

— Electoral Registration Officers themselves should be permitted to raise an objection to registration and investigate—at present they can only investigate in response to third party objections.

MigrationwatchUK strongly supports all of these recommendations and believes that they should be implemented without delay.

The Extent of the Problem

14. It is often said that few cases of electoral fraud appear in the courts, but this is likely to be because no checks are made and no evidence exposed. In a written answer of 9 March 2004, Christopher Leslie MP gave a list of the 20 constituencies in which the highest number of registered electors were lost from the Register between 2001 and 2003. Of the constituency at the top of that list, Brentford and Isleworth, the Minister admitted that the decrease of 15,486 people (18.6%) in two years "may be due to the cleaning of the Registers, rather than actual falls in the number of electors". It is likely that a great many names that had been on the Registers in 2001 should not have been there.

15. On 7 February 2004, The Daily Mail published an article revealing that it had succeeded in registering a fictitious student, Gus Troobev (an anagram of "bogus voter"), in 31 Electoral Registers and to obtain a further nine bogus votes in the most marginal constituency in the country. The first 31 registrations had taken only a few hours and no identification had been required by most of the local authorities involved.

16. The Department of Constitutional Affairs has been examining the experience of Northern Ireland, where a system of individual voter registration has been adopted. People wishing to vote in the province must now provide a number of identifiers including date of birth, signature, National Insurance number and photographic identification. These reforms were introduced in the Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act 2002, and were prompted by the relationship between sectarian enmity and electoral fraud. There was a reduction of some 120,000 names (10%) on the first Register compiled under the new system of individual registration and identifiers.

17. There has been no political stimulus comparable to the Northern Ireland peace process to prompt similar reforms to the electoral system in Great Britain. This is unfortunate. As the Electoral Commission said in its report on Northern Ireland's new electoral registration system in December 2003; "the right to register to vote and the ability to exercise that right in elections that are safeguarded against abuse and malpractice is the foundation of any democratic society."

18. It is essential to the integrity and credibility of democracy in the United Kingdom that there be proper checks on the legal eligibility to vote of those placed on the Electoral Register. This, rather than making voting methods easier, should be the focus of the Government's reforms of the electoral system. Despite the recommendations of the Electoral Commission, it is a central lacuna that has yet to be addressed.

Migration, Citizenship and the Franchise

19. A broader, but no less significant issue is the scale of the franchise extended to legal migrants to the UK and the electoral impact this may have.

20. Paragraphs 4-5 above list the voting rights of migrants to the UK. Whilst the rights of EU citizens are reciprocated in other EU Member States (as they must be under European law), the only Commonwealth countries that offer reciprocal voting rights to UK citizens are the handful mentioned in paragraph 6 above.

21. Given the progressive erosion over time of the reciprocal voting rights of UK citizens in other Commonwealth countries, the position has come to look increasingly one-sided and the Representation of the People Act 2000 did not address this. As a matter of principle, the right to vote should not be conferred upon citizens of a country that does not confer reciprocal voting rights upon citizens of the UK. To do so weakens the concept of citizenship which the Government is seeking to encourage.

22. The absence of effective checks on citizenship and immigration status leaves the door open to fraudulent registration. For example, citizens of Northern Cyprus can easily claim to be EU citizens, Somalis can claim to be Kenyans and Portugese speakers form Angola can claim to be Commonwealth citizens from Mozambique. The numbers may be small in particular cases but the principle of effective checks is important.

23. More generally, the number of Commonwealth citizens migrating to the UK, especially in recent years, has been high. In the 10 years to 2002, 655,500 Commonwealth citizens have done so[49]. Of these, only around 348,500 have taken UK citizenship, [50]of whom around 69,500 were minors. [51]The result is that around 245,000 non-UK citizens are able to vote in British elections simply by virtue of their Commonwealth origins and of these only a very small proportion come from countries that offer reciprocal voting rights to UK citizens. [52]

24. This situation is not only inequitable, but also illogical. It extends the franchise to a large number of individuals whose allegiances lie in states other than the United Kingdom. It is quite clearly an anachronism which, given the recent sustained increase in immigration, is by no means a negligible one. It should be removed in any modernisation of the British electoral system.