Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
25 JANUARY 2005
MR DAVID
SIMPSON, MR
PETER WATT
AND MR
MARK PACK
Q100 Mr Beith: As a matter of practice
how much do your parties use the published electoral register
or the marked register as a means of establishing whether some
fraud has taken place; not for other purposes mentioned earlier
but for establishing whether some kind of fraud has taken place
or electoral malpractice?
Mr Simpson: I would say only at
a time when the result of an election in a particular ward or
constituency is challenged.
Q101 Mr Beith: You would be challenging
it.
Mr Simpson: Yes, of course. We
would challenge the result in a particular case, if it were maybe
a result like the Halesowen case a year or so ago where the returning
officer was actually taken to the election court on the balance
of probability of whether or not people had received postal vote
application forms. It was a key decision which I believe involved
the Labour Party in quite some cost.
Mr Watt: I could not possibly
comment on the cost, but we certainly had some interest. That
was an interesting case in that the issue there was whether or
not the fact that someone did not receive their postal vote, for
reasons to do with the Post Office or whatever, was actually a
valid reason to contest the outcome of the election. It was an
important point of principle. I would agree with David in a sense
when it comes to fraud, but what we would use the electoral register
for would be as a check, to make sure that people are being registered
to vote. It becomes quite clear, as you are getting to know your
patch and pounding the streets, as I am sure colleagues do regularly,
that there are certain parts of your constituency where rates
of registration are very low. If you knock at a house and no-one
in the house is on the register and it happens door after door
and you realise that there is a particular problem, then you would
want to take some remedial action.
Mr Pack: The other issue in respect
of fraud is that the existence of the electoral register, the
publication of the marked register and so on are not just useful
in terms of when a particular allegation comes up being able to
see whether it looks like there is some evidence to make it worth
pursuing, but also that it helps prevent fraud in that certain
types of fraud are a lot easier to spot because we have a public
electoral register and because we have a marked register which
can be inspected. If either or both of those did not apply, it
is quite plausible that there would be all sorts of fraud taking
place which do not happen at the moment because they would then
become much easier.
Q102 Mr Beith: Do you have concerns about
the potential reduced size of the register from individual registration,
except in so far as that is because of the deletion of fraudulent
or mistaken entries?
Mr Watt: We certainly do. I would
say that was our main concern. Whilst we are wholly in favour,
as a matter of principle, of individual voter registration, we
have real concerns about the speed with which it would be introduced.
The Electoral Commission have made some reassuring noises in terms
of their recommendations for phasing in individual voter registration,
but if you look at Northern Ireland as an example where that clearly
would have a big impact, there are certain groups which would
be particularly badly affected. Young people and students come
to mind. If we were just to go from household registration to
individual registration we would have real concerns.
Q103 Chairman: The problem in Northern
Ireland was not necessarily the first register, it was the continuing
process. In a sense it could be done quickly, as long as some
way was found to make sure that particularly young people and
other groups actually registered.
Mr Simpson: It would be impossible
to run things side by side. You have to have a cut-off point and
if it were determined by parliament that we should go to individual
registration from a particular date, then that is what would happen.
I do not see how you can have a dual system.
Mr Pack: It is also the case that
whilst we share the concerns about what would be the initial impact
on the registration rate, when you separate out two other parts
of that issue, one of which is the impact that actually has on
turnout in an election and therefore to what extent the people
who do not register initially are the people who are not going
to vote and therefore although there is still an impact of having
reduced registration rates, it may not be as significant, but,
also, in general in this country we are very poor at providing
people with opportunities to register. If you compare, for example,
the circumstance in Australia with Britain, in Australia there
is much more integration, much more joined-up government—in
the modern jargon—than there is in Britain. Our view would
very much be that if we go down the route of individual registration,
one way of dealing with the issue about a possible drop in registration
rates is to look also at making it easier for people to register
and it being tied up with the other sorts of things people do
in terms of telling the Royal Mail when they move, giving information
to DVLA and similar activities.
Q104 Peter Bottomley: In one area we
have made the change already for service voters. In the past people
in the armed services could register and would not have to change
and they could always go on voting. We have now moved to individual
registration. It is quite clear that the evidence is that registration
has dropped very significantly. There you have a monopoly employer,
who knows where the people are and registration has gone down
and down, has it not?
Mr Watt: I would agree and we
are concerned. There are some merits in the household system in
that we would not throw out the baby with the bath water here.
It is not beyond the wit of us to come up with a system which
maintains the advantages of the household registration whilst
actually having individual voter registration; perhaps a household
registration form which requires individual voters to sign, particularly
if voters begin to have their own voter identification number
or whatever that becomes known as. I do not want to bring in any
disagreement when there is clearly agreement between the three
of us so far, but a note of disagreement with Mark. Whilst I do
not think the issue first of all would be that just because voters
did not register, there would not necessarily be a drop in turnout.
I do not think that is the issue because if people are on the
register then we can communicate with them. If we are communicating
with them, it might not mean they vote in this election, but the
fact that they have been communicated with over a series of elections
may well be a factor which leads them to decide to vote at some
point in the future. I certainly would not want to give the impression
that we would be unconcerned just because they did not vote when
they were not on the register.
Mr Simpson: The thing with the
service voting is that it is different in the sense that you have
always had one person in the household consistently, every year,
having to do a registration. It was considered that if you joined
the service of your country and you registered to vote once, that
stayed with you for life. It is that principle which has been
changed by the 2000 Act and that has caused the real problem and
the reduction in the number of service people voting or inclined
to vote.
The Committee suspended from 4 pm to 4.10
pm for a division in the House
Q105 Mr Betts: May I pick
up three points, one made by each of you, and see whether there
might be some agreement on the way forward with individual registration?
Peter Watt was saying that there might be a possibility of having
household forms which the head of the household received but then
individuals signed them in their own capacity. Presumably that
could be backed up by individual forms as well for anybody who
wanted one. Mark Pack was making the point earlier about the use
of other information, driving licence, council tax or whatever,
as a means of getting information about individuals and where
they lived and the appropriateness of using that. David Simpson
was making the point that we used to have a situation where service
personnel, once they were registered in a particular place, stayed
on the register. There is that continuity principle: if someone
is registered at an address, whether or not they stay there they
remain registered. Are they three points about which there might
be common agreement?
Mr Simpson: On the service vote
issue I rather think that a squaddy in Basra has more things on
his mind than getting a vote back home. It seems to me that once
people had signed up for the services they had the right to remain.
Q106 Mr Betts: I was really asking you
about the continuity principle and whether it was a general one
which could be applied across to everybody.
Mr Simpson: I believe that there
has to be an annual registration.
Q107 Chairman: Why? Why does there have
to be an annual registration?
Mr Simpson: Historically that
has been the case. Though we do not have to follow history necessarily
it has stood us in good stead thus far in creating electoral rolls.
One of the problems sometimes is that local authorities, bless
them, do not always follow up and do the removals from registers
as quickly as they might and that leads to excess numbers on an
electoral roll. If you are then looking at the problem like Northern
Ireland, where about 120,000 people came off the roll the first
year they went to individual registration, an awful lot of that
could have been natural wastage; let us put it that way. They
still think that annual registration is necessary in order to
maintain an interest and maintain an accurate list for a particular
local area.
Mr Watt: In terms of annual registration,
what we would say is that again it is the baby and the bath water
argument. There are some disadvantages to annual registration
which, for example, the Electoral Commissioner identified in that
it does not necessarily target under-represented groups particularly
well for instance. On the other hand, what it does do is put the
onus on local authorities to make an effort once a year in order
to make sure their register is accurate. There are some very good
examples around the country of authorities which have made the
most of the annual registration. Again, what we would support
would be a combination of maintaining the annual register, together
with more targeted and focused work where local authorities are
sharing best practice of what works in terms of increasing the
registration of under-represented groups so you would get the
advantages of both. I think that is where we would want to end
up on this.
Mr Pack: It also adds an important
safeguard in terms of both new properties appearing and old properties
going. One of the problems all councils face is that electoral
registration is not a great vote winner and therefore when it
comes to allocating resources they are often relatively short
of money. Having an annual process ensures that at least once
a year there is a thorough check of the validity of the data.
Whilst councils vary somewhat in how quickly they respond, for
example, either to properties being demolished or new properties
being built, we have at the moment the guarantee that once a year
any issues like that are sorted out and we have a guarantee that
once a year a whole range of other issues will be sorted out.
Q108 Mr Betts: When some of us were recently
in Australia and talked to the Electoral Commission there, they
just looked in amazement at us when we described our system and
said "Why do you bother sending out forms every year to people
who have not changed their address, have not changed their circumstances
and, if people do not send them back, chasing them up with an
actual physical canvass?". What they do there is actually
require other organisations, the utility companies, the postal
authorities, the driving licence authorities, to inform the Electoral
Commission when there have been changes of address. The Commission's
job then is to chase those people whose circumstances have changed.
They say that therefore they focus their efforts on the people
whose registration position is going to be changed.
Mr Simpson: So all the power is
with the Commission out there and not with the local people and
the local authorities.
Q109 Mr Betts: Yes; either the national
commission or the state commission. Whether it is or not, that
is the requirement and they chase the people whose circumstances
have changed. They claim that their register is 98% to 99% accurate,
which is a lot more accurate than ours is.
Mr Watt: I would agree with that.
I do not have any problems with that in the sense of the advantage
of data sharing. I heard some of your conversation with previous
witnesses and I think that there is a lot to be gained from data
sharing with utility companies, even within local authorities.
There is also a practical consideration which gives us concern
in terms of the more targeted rolling approach and that is that
there is the danger of political bias, or at least the allegation
and perception of political bias in terms of where is being targeted
for registration. Certainly in some of the proposals which have
come forward from the Electoral Commission, we can imagine scenarios
in which, even if it were not true, there would be the perception
that particular areas were being targeted for voter registration
for party political purposes. The advantage at the moment is that
we have an annual registration and we know for practical purposes
what that means for us practically. It works, so I think it is
better to stay where we are and add on the benefits of the sorts
of things you are talking about, than to get rid of the system
and start again.
Peter Bottomley: Is it not true, picking
up what Sir Paul Beresford said, that if electoral registration
officers use the 192.com and Experian type of information, that
should be able to throw up households where they thought something
had changed and they could check, on an exception basis? Is it
not also true that the Andrew Bennett issue, that so long as local
authorities say you can just ring up and report that there has
been no change, you actually cut out half the expense of organising
it? Would it not be a good idea also if even this place could
actually agree with the Treasury that to call both the Treasury
and Number One Parliament Street parliamentary building Number
One Parliament Street is absurd?
Chairman: I cannot get smiles on the
record very easily.
Q110 Mr Betts: In terms of the cut-off
date for allowing people to register before an election, do we
not have to get that far closer particularly to general election
dates? We all know people who suddenly realise that they are not
registered and who become very disgruntled and disaffected and
cannot understand why, as there are still weeks to go to polling
day something cannot be done. In many states in the United States,
for example, you can literally register on the day. I know they
do not have an electoral registration system we would want to
copy in every respect, but would there not be something to be
said for trying to get the data a lot closer to polling day and
how close do you think we can get?
Mr Pack: Our view would certainly
be that we would agree there is an almost, one is tempted to say,
very English eccentricity that the point at which most members
of the public are aware that there is an election on and maybe
they have not sorted out their electoral registration, the deadlines
have been and gone. It is difficult to see, if one were to sit
down to invent a system, that one would come up with that system
of having a deadline before most people notice there may be an
issue. That said, the electoral register is used for a range of
purposes, including, for example for Westminster elections and
the provision of the Freepost election address leaflet, if candidates
decide they wish to use an addressed leaflet they pull that information
from the electoral register. In terms of it being an important
tool for candidates campaigning. There is a trade-off between
having a deadline which is closer to polling day, which is more
convenient for the public and having a deadline which is further
away from polling day, which is more convenient for those who
make use of the electoral register.
Q111 Chairman: Come on. If a political
party has 10 extra names, it is not that difficult to do an extra
set of labels, is it?
Mr Pack: Absolutely. The question
is whether you get the 10 extra names two hours before the polls
close or you get them with a little bit more notice. There is
a trade-off. Certainly our view would be that the current date
is not the optimal one for trading off those different factors.
The other issue it does tie into is exactly what happens with
the rest of the registration process. The question is: at that
deadline date, whenever the date happens to be, are you getting
10 extra names or are you getting 5,000 extra names, which are
two very different scenarios?
Q112 Sir Paul Beresford: If the cut-off
date were very, very close to the election, particularly where
you have small numbers of votes which would conclude the election
in particular wards, do you not feel you would run the possibility
of a transitional movement of individuals?
Mr Watt: Yes, there is that risk
and that is the balance. In a sense you have hit the nail on the
head. For practical purposes we would support the registration
up to close of nominations; that would seem to us to be sufficiently
far away from polling day. Even with that, it does not completely
mitigate the situation you are describing. As with all these things,
they have to be balanced against the fact that there are individuals—take
a parliamentary by-election—who suddenly become aware of
the fact that there is this rather important event taking place
in their constituency and at that point they realise they cannot
actually take part. Those two things have to be balanced.
Mr Simpson: I would go along with
Peter here. Sir Paul may be referring back to the Swampy factor
in Newbury some years ago. There is a danger of small groups of
people believing that they should have a disproportionate ability
to influence a result.
Q113 Mr Betts: Are you talking about
the Liberal Democrats?
Mr Simpson: I am not talking about
the Liberal Democrats at all; would I dare? I am merely talking
about the fact the there are groups of individuals, who may not
be party political, who may have a view on the outcome of that
particular result in that particular constituency. I do think
it is quite right that we should have a date which is a bit further
out than that.
Q114 Mr Betts: May I raise one other
issue and that is that if we go to individual registration there
clearly are some arrangements now, which operate in nursing homes
and halls of residence for students, where there is a bit of a
centralised attempt to register everyone? How do you see that
being affected by moving towards individual registration? How
can we practically develop systems to make sure people do get
registered?
Mr Watt: I would say that for
all practical purposes we would prefer a system where there was
a maintaining of household registration whilst introducing individual
registration. In the situations you describe, for practical purposes,
the warden or whoever it was would receive a list of those people
who were previously registered and it would be incumbent upon
them to ensure those individuals signed, marked the form, whatever
it was. You do not then lose people off the register while at
the same time you maintain the individual voter registration.
Q115 Chairman: It would be a nightmare,
would it not, for the principal of the hall of residence? You
would have 95% of the students having signed and you would be
waiting for that one who had disappeared somewhere. It would be
somewhat onerous.
Mr Watt: Yes, if you took it to
the Nth degree in that sense it would be a nightmare. There must
be a practical way through this in terms of halls of residence
which could be worked through.
Q116 Mr Clelland: It says here that the
Labour Party favours the introduction of a national register and
that the Conservatives are firmly against any moves to centralise
electoral registration services. Perhaps Peter Watt could tell
us what the advantages of a centralised register would be and
David Simpson could tell us what the disadvantages would be. Perhaps
Mark Pack could give us a third way.
Mr Watt: The advantages of a national
register in campaigning, or for individual voters, is that we
can then move towards a multi-channel-enabled election which I
know the government are in favour of, so that people are not tied
to voting in one polling station which is somewhere near where
they are actually registered to vote, but they could in theory
vote anywhere in their constituency or even outside the constituency.
Obviously once you have a national register, those sorts of things
become possible in the way that, for practical purposes, they
are not possible at the moment. There are also some very practical
advantages for political parties. At the moment the cost of managing
600-odd different registers, which are given to us in different
formats, and turning those into a campaigning tool, a process
which all major political parties have to go through, is extremely
high and over a year the costs seem to increase disproportionately.
There are both advantages for voters, but also advantages for
political parties as well.
Q117 Mr Clelland: So the individual voter
would have a unique number or identifier which would be allocated
to them and their constituency. They could vote anywhere in the
country but that vote would be allocated to that particular constituency.
Mr Watt: Yes.
Q118 Sir Paul Beresford: Would that increase
the chance of impersonation?
Mr Watt: Security is always a
concern with these things. It has to be balanced against making
it easier for people to vote. Impersonation can take place now.
People could just walk into a polling station, if they wanted
to. The requirements for security versus the ease with which people
can vote have to be balanced. Take myself, if I had a unique voting
number and I went to a polling station and was told I had already
cast my vote somewhere else, then that would clearly be cause
for concern and there would be an audit trail, because it would
be obvious where my vote had been cast.
Q119 Sir Paul Beresford: One of the advantages
of having it quite narrow is that there is a chance you will meet
the neighbour, but if the head of the household wanted to vote
a particular way for the whole of his household and they were
all away on holiday, he could go round a selection of polling
booths voting for himself, his son—not his wife, but you
get the point.
Mr Watt: I do not believe that
we would invent a system which was absolutely 100% secure whilst
at the same time making it as easy as possible for voters to cast
their vote and that is the balance. The Electoral Commission will
certainly have a really vital role, once we have a national register,
in terms of auditing some of these. Spot checking, random checking
of voters who voted and those sorts of functions are ways which
will not only increase the security of the ballot, but will also
be seen to increase the security of the ballot.
Mr Simpson: We believe, frankly,
that local is best and local people vote for local communities,
they vote in their local communities and their registration should
be kept within their local communities. On the other hand, obviously
there has to be a national database and we are fully signed up
to the creation of a national register, but by keeping it local
and bringing it together through a system. We are all looking
forward to the day when the money comes forward from government
and we get the CORE project properly under way; we hope that will
be not very far away, because we all believe, without exception
amongst the larger parties, that that is the right way forward
to create a national database. It is how you get there. As far
as we are concerned, we should say: keeping things local, making
sure people have an interest in their local community and that
registration remains local is the best way forward.
Mr Pack: In some ways the differences
of view are slightly a matter of semantics. There is quite broad
agreement amongst political parties and hopefully Peter and David
will not immediately contradict what I have to say in terms of
believing that there is an important role for the local knowledge
and expertise which councils and their electoral services staff
have, particularly about where the flat over the shop is, where
you get to it, round by the steps, round the back on a different
street, and so on. Whatever electoral registration model we have,
having that degree of local knowledge and expertise is important.
Secondly, I think there is a broad degree of consensus that there
is a deep level of frustration at the huge variation in data standards
and quality of data on the register. On the one hand local expertise
is important, but on the other hand much more uniformity of data
standards should go hand in hand with that. What you are left
with then in terms of scope for disagreement is relatively minor
in my view in terms of whether people have a unique national electoral
registration number or whether we use some other number which
is in existence for other purposes and doubles up for that. If
we have that, do we allow people a much wider degree of discretion
as to which polling station they vote in or not? To be honest,
both of those are in a sense options. In terms of the immediate
future, in my view they might be less pressing than getting a
good set of national data standards implemented, enforced and
followed.
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