Examination of Witnesses (Questions 97-99)
25 JANUARY 2005
MR DAVID
SIMPSON, MR
PETER WATT
AND MR
MARK PACK
Q97 Chairman: May I welcome you to the
final session this afternoon? Would you identify yourselves for
the record and then if anyone wants to say anything briefly by
way of introduction, we shall be happy to hear it?
Mr Pack: I am Mark Pack from the
Liberal Democrats.
Mr Simpson: David Simpson from
the Conservative Party.
Mr Watt: Peter Watt from the Labour
Party.
Q98 Chairman: Does anyone want to say
anything by way of introduction or are you happy for us to go
straight to questions?
Mr Simpson: I am perfectly happy
to go straight to questions.
Mr Pack: Yes; straight to questions.
Mr Watt: Yes.
Q99 Mr Beith: I am not sure whether I
should declare an interest, because, like all other members of
this Committee, I am a member of one of the parties represented
by one of you. You are all representatives of political parties
interested in organising elections competently and beneficially,
so presumably any views you have on this subject are really more
dictated by how you organise elections than by some grand principle
of whether it is better for us to be collectively registered in
households or individually registered as individuals. What advantage
do you see for yourselves in it?
Mr Pack: The main potential advantage
of individual registration from our perspective is the extra security
it can provide for postal voting. Regardless of the issue around
possible all-postal voting or postal voting on demand or widespread
electronic voting, even under the current set-up an increasing
proportion of votes is cast by post. I think that there is a general
view that the current security arrangements are far from ideal
and that individual registration provides the possibility of gathering
extra information about individuals. There are obviously some
questions about whether signatures, dates of birth, other identifiers
and so on, can be used to validate that a postal vote is really
cast by the person it says it should be cast by. It would be fair
to say that is a fairly important point of principle to say that
there needs to be a reasonable way of being assured that votes
are being cast by those who are entitled to cast them.
Mr Simpson: We would certainly
go along with all of that argument. There are distinct advantages
in individuals knowing that they are committing themselves, whereas
the householder will merely tick a box which says X, Y and Z still
live here. Thank you very much. Sign it off and away it goes and
X, Y and Z may never even be consulted about it. It does not have
to be the case. It is right that there is individual responsibility
which is extremely important in this exercise. We would certainly
support the Northern Ireland system if we were asked how to deal
with this. The way forward there, with the use of the National
Insurance number—I will not go into the other identifier
which is used in Northern Ireland necessarily—seems to me
to be the appropriate way forward.
Mr Watt: The other issue of principle
is that we want as many people as possible to be taking part in
the electoral process. I think we would all agree that we would
want to move forward to multi-channel-enabled elections where
people have choices as to how they cast their votes. The practical
reality is that the only way that is going to happen is that we
do have individual voter registration, where people can vote at
more places than just that one polling station at a single point
in their constituency.
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