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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