Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
25 JANUARY 2005
MR SAM
YOUNGER AND
MS PAMELA
GORDON
Q1 Chairman: May I welcome you all to
the first session of the joint committee, that is the ODPM and
the Constitutional Affairs Select Committees, joint inquiry into
electoral registration? May I just point out to you that the written
evidence that we have received has been published this morning
and is available from the Stationery Office at the cost of £13,
but probably of more interest to most of you will be that you
can actually look at it on the web, at a minimal cost I suppose
of connection. May I welcome the two of you and ask you to identify
yourselves for the record, please?
Mr Younger: Sam Younger, Chairman
of the Electoral Commission.
Ms Gordon: Pamela Gordon, Electoral
Commissioner.
Q2 Chairman: Do you want to say anything
by way of introduction, or are you happy for us to go straight
to questions?
Mr Younger: Happy, Chairman, for
you to go straight to questions.
Q3 Mr Beith: In your written evidence,
you refer both to the overriding principle that a right as fundamental
as voting should only be secured by personal initiative, then,
to a series of practical reasons which you say favour individual
registration. If the practical reasons were shown not to stand
up, indeed if it were shown for example that it would not be likely
to increase participation and might have the opposite effect,
would the reason of principle be an overriding one and would you
stick to your view that it is a principle that people should register
themselves?
Mr Younger: We do have to be very
careful on this. Clearly, we have looked at it in terms of the
principle and all the practical benefits that we think would flow
from it. We have to be aware of the one area of experience that
there has already been in this, in Northern Ireland, moving from
household to individual registration. Clearly, there are some
practical difficulties there. It seems to us we need to work through
those, to see whether they can be overcome, so that you do not
have essentially the opposite effect of that intended. The principle
has to be the right one. If there were overriding reasons, then
I think we would need to look at it again; it is something we
need to be pragmatic about.
Q4 Mr Beith: Do you have any evidence
that the current system is thought by people to be confusing or,
conversely, that it is a trusted system that people are quite
comfortable with?
Mr Younger: There is no evidence
that people are uncomfortable with it. There is evidence that
people have been able to use it and use it perfectly comfortably
for very many years. What we were looking at was a case for change
based on up-to-date issues of data protection rights and so on,
but also, more practically, how we could improve both the security
of postal voting in the first instance and then the ability of
the registration system to support further developments in voting
over time.
Q5 Mr Beith: How far was your interest
driven by all-postal voting, with a piloting of it, or indeed
using it more generally? There clearly are arguments relating
to all-postal voting which strengthen the case for individual
registration. If we do not go down the road of all-posting voting,
does the case for individual registration weaken?
Mr Younger: The original review
we did of registration was not based on all-posting voting, it
was one of the reviews which came out of our report on the 2001
general election and was based on the fact that there had been
postal voting on demand. Clearly the practical implications, and
if the reasons are there to go for individual registration in
terms of postal voting on demand, are even stronger in scale if
you have all-postal voting. The principle of individual registration
and the extra security in postal voting are applicable and whatever
the future in terms of all-posting voting, the fact is that with
postal voting on demand we are already up at what was 8.1% of
the electorate registered as postal voters in the elections last
June and that must be a figure which is rising and it is a very
significant number in any event. In our view, the argument there
in general terms is there, whether or not there is all-postal
voting.
Q6 Peter Bottomley: Can you remind us?
In the United States I think they have generally individual registration.
What is the proportion of potentially eligible voters who are
registered?
Mr Younger: I do not have figures
for the United States.
Q7 Peter Bottomley: Until I am contradicted,
I put it to you that it is pretty low compared with us. Should
not the overriding principle be that all potentially eligible
voters should be registered and that there also ought then to
be the principle that the individual voters can check that they
are registered or get themselves off a register if there is inappropriate
registration?
Mr Younger: That has to be the
principle, yes.
Q8 Peter Bottomley: Both?
Mr Younger: Yes. Everybody who
is eligible to be on the register should be on the register. The
issue is how you best get to that and get to it in a way that
also helps the security and the future of the voting system.
Q9 Chairman: If someone does not intend
to vote, perhaps for religious reasons, is there a logic for them
to be on the register?
Mr Younger: Of course in response
to a request for information it is an offence not to provide that
information or to provide false information. The number of prosecutions
there are for failure to return information for the register is
very, very small. In this case, in terms of voting, we have always
had the principle up to now that voting is voluntary, but, up
to now, there is an obligation to provide information that is
requested for the register. So in theory it is actually an obligation
to provide that information.
Q10 Peter Bottomley: And it is used for
jury lists as well.
Mr Younger: Yes.
Q11 Chris Mole: You touched on the Northern
Ireland experience. In your memorandum you seem rather reluctant
to accept the significance in the fall in registration in Northern
Ireland and you state in paragraph 4.10 ". . . the experience
of introducing individual registration to Northern Ireland might
suggest an initial impact of a drop in registration rates".
How much do you feel the decline in the numbers on the electoral
register in Northern Ireland since the introduction is due to
a drop in registration rates, as opposed to other causes such
as eradication of duplicate entries? Do you forecast that the
drop will continue or that registration rates will return to previous
levels?
Mr Younger: It is something we
have to take very seriously. Clearly, there would have been an
expectation when the register was cleaned in Northern Ireland
in the context of the 2002 Electoral Fraud Act, that there would
be a drop-off which would partly be the greater accuracy of that
register, but that the increased requirements in terms of individuals
putting their signature, having their date of birth, their national
insurance number and so on would lead to an extra drop-off. The
jury is still out on exactly where the proportion of those reasons
is, but we do have to take it seriously and in the context of
looking at the potential applicability to Great Britain, we do
need to take that on board. I note what the Northern Ireland Affairs
Select Committee said in their report that they did not think
at this stage that that exact system should be rolled out to Great
Britain and I think there is some force in that. However, the
conditions are not exactly the same in Northern Ireland and in
a sense, what we are currently discussing with government is how
we can modernise that system of registration whilst taking into
account the lessons that there certainly are from Northern Ireland
and the analysis of those lessons is continuing.
Q12 Chris Mole: So what general lessons
do you think we can learn from the Northern Ireland experience
before introducing a similar system in Great Britain?
Mr Younger: One of the things
in Great Britain relates to this issue of the carryover. It seems
to me, though we have not pinned this down finally, that if one
is to introduce it in Britain, because the reasons why we are
introducing it are not exactly the same in Northern Ireland—that
is a sort of once-off, where you are off the register if you do
not fill in the individual registration form on day one—that
may well not be right but something that is graded and gradual
as you introduce a new system has to be something which is well
worth exploring and it is important to explore that. There is
also the question by comparison with Northern Ireland of the sort
of identifiers. One of the issues in Northern Ireland was having
to find the National Insurance number. Our view currently is that
we would not need necessarily to do that in the rest of the UK.
I would say that we have to be very careful. I very much recognise
the fears that there are and I note very much that the government's
response to our earlier recommendations on individual registration,
which of course, in what was being responded to, pre-dated the
experience in Northern Ireland, said that they were sympathetic
to the principles of individual registration, but concerned about
practical implementation. I think it is very, very fair point.
Q13 Chris Mole: Was that an approval
of the rollover process that I though I detected there? I think
the experience suggests that it is, as ever, the hard-to-reach
groups which are the most likely to fall off the register. The
Committee would be interested in hearing what strategies you have
put in place to address that in Northern Ireland specifically.
Did I hear you say you would welcome rollover coming back?
Mr Younger: Interestingly, in
the context of Northern Ireland, we had some scepticism about
rollover in the initial system in Northern Ireland, because the
great thrust of the Fraud Act was to tidy up and clean up the
register and it would have been in conflict with that purpose.
Looking at the register in GB, I think we would say that you do
need to find some kind of rollover and link that to the question—
Q14 Chairman: Explain "rollover".
Mr Younger: This is not having
a register which, as it were, starts from ground zero every year.
In other words, people stay on it and only have to re-register
periodically. In Northern Ireland, up to now, since 2002, if you
do not re-register every single year, you are off the new register.
Q15 Chairman: So are talking about rollover
for a year, two years or for ever?
Mr Younger: I do not have an absolutely
fixed position, because these are the practicalities which we
are getting into discussing now. I should have thought, in the
context of GB, certainly not for ever. You need to have a way
of cleaning up the register so that when people who, as it were,
have not bothered to take themselves off because they have moved,
gone away, whatever, you can do that.
Q16 Peter Bottomley: Died?
Mr Younger: Possibly. On the other
hand, I think you need to have a period of grace. There is another
reason, not just the fear of people dropping off the register,
but also, and this relates to the promotion of getting people
on the register, you have the issue that if you do take people
off the register less frequently, in other words, you do not do
the absolutely full 100% annual canvass, some of the resources
that we currently use for what is effectively repeat business
of not very high value could be diverted a little bit more into
trying to reach harder-to-reach groups. You could focus maybe
more on those, which is a slightly separate issue. The effort
of going to, taking the example of Northern Ireland, a full personal
annual canvass when a very high percentage are people who are
staying in the same place, is where the use of that resource is
not necessarily of great value by comparison with the other ways
those resources could be used.
Q17 Dr Whitehead: You mentioned a moment
ago the recommendation that National Insurance numbers would not
be necessary as far as individual registration in concerned in
Great Britain. Why do you think that would not be necessary? In
Northern Ireland various photo identity cards have been required
and you make no mention of that as a possible individual identifier
in Great Britain. Could you comment on that?
Mr Younger: Yes, certainly. When
we looked at the registration process and made our recommendations
for GB, which we did in the early part of the 2003, we were not
particularly looking at the model of Northern Ireland, we were
looking at what would, in the context of the GB register, be useful
and valuable security and other identifiers. We felt that the
addition of a date of birth and a voter signature was quite sufficient
for the purposes that we were after. That is the reason that we
did not wish to do that in Northern Ireland. I am sorry, the second
part of your question was . . . ?
Q18 Dr Whitehead: The question of photo
identity cards of various kinds. Four options were suggested in
Northern Ireland.
Mr Younger: Again, we were looking
at the development of the registration requirements as a matter
of remote voting and in a sense the voter identity card is not
a requirement of the registration process, it is a requirement
of going and voting in a polling station, if you do not have other
designated photo identification in Northern Ireland. It does raise
an issue that we have not looked at yet very hard, and perhaps
we should, which is, in the context of polling stations, what
sort of identification should be required, because the tradition
in this country is not to require any identification. There is
no doubt that in the context of Northern Ireland, the photo identification
has been something which has, in the Northern Ireland context,
improved credibility to some extent in terms of those going in
to vote in polling stations being who they say they are.
Ms Gordon: May I add something
to that? We have also suggested that voters would be given a unique
registration number for voting purposes. That obviously, looking
to the future, would be an extra check and a vital check for any
electronic voting, in the same way that the signature would provide
for a cross-check based on a sample basis for postal voting. They
are both security measures that we are suggesting. We have not
thought it necessary to add the photographic evidence to those;
not at this stage anyway.
Q19 Dr Whitehead: If you were in future
to undertake individual registration by telephone or internet,
you would not at that stage have a unique registration number.
How would you deal with the security and possible fraud implications
as far as that was concerned?
Ms Gordon: If it were introduced
before there was individual registration? This is why we have
seen the two things as needing to go together, because, for any
form of electronic or remote voting, one is going to need to have
identifiers which will be absolutely secure within whatever system
is available. How one would do that outside individual registration
becomes much more complicated, much less easy to see.
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