Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs Written Evidence


Memorandum by Andrew Robathan MP (VOT 30)

  Thank you for your letter of 2l December about the Select Committee joint inquiry into "electoral registration".

  I am personally extremely worried about the levels of fraud reported across the country, the incidence of the collection of postal votes before they have been filled in and other issues that arose from the local and European elections in June last year. Furthermore, I am very concerned about the integrity of the electoral roll, which I believe to be deeply flawed and I regret to say that I suspect that there are now deliberate attempts to get people onto the electoral roll who should not be there. Certainly in Northern Ireland, there have been reports of dead people voting in the past—I do think that the integrity of the electoral roll must be part of the bedrock of our democratic system, or else no election can ever be judged to have been entirely fair. However, I will leave it to others with greater knowledge to give specific evidence on this.

  However, I would like particularly to draw to the Committee's attention the issue of the electoral registration of servicemen and women, serving at home or abroad. The Representation of the People Act 2000 changed the manner in which service personnel registered to vote. Previously, all members of the armed forces would be given a service registration card to complete and that remained in force until they either left the forces or they registered as a private citizen. This is what, I seem to recall, I did and I was registered as a voter throughout my army career of 15 years.

  This was all changed in February 2001 and service personnel are now not given a service registration card to complete as a matter of course and the result is that there has been a drop of 81% in service voters registered in Scotland and, as an example in Chichester, in 2000 there were 483 service voters registered and there were only 22 registered last year. I would draw attention to the Adjournment Debate in Westminster Hall on 8 December, column 117WH, led by Andrew Tyrie, which particularly raises this issue.

  I have raised this issue with the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence and he has dismissed my concerns—I understand the Electoral Commission will be looking into this at some stage later this year, after May. I do not believe this is acceptable. For further information, I enclose a letter sent to Soldier magazine in October last year which particular refers to service personnel overseas not voting. There are now, including Northern Ireland, 52,500 personnel overseas and there seems to be little effort to encourage them to register. I have to say that I think the Electoral Commission should spend rather more time on this than on some of the rather more obscure issues that they have taken up in the last couple of years. As a further example, I enclose a letter from a soldier with 12 years service in the September edition of Soldier magazine revealing that "many soldiers are simply confused".

  I therefore very much hope that the Select Committee Joint Inquiry will look at this as well.

  The following papers have not been printed as they are already in the public domain, however, they are available on request from the Committee Office.

  VOT 30(a)—Selection of articles from Soldier Magazine.

  VOT 30(b)—Westminster Hall debate on Electoral Registration (Service Personnel), 8 December 2004, Column 117WH.


 
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