Select Committee on the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013
An electoral system fit for today? More to be done
Report of Session 2019-21 - published 8 July 2020 - HL Paper 83
Contents
Box 1: Key recommendations of the Committee
Chapter 1: Introduction and background
The Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013: why this inquiry now?
Chapter 2: The individual electoral registration (IER) system
Issues and challenges around the implementation of Individual Electoral Registration
Box 2: Cabinet Office role in IER implementation
The impact of “event-led” electoral registration
Table 1: Impact of ‘event-led registration’ in recent major electoral events
Duplicate registrations and online look-up tools
Election-related registration costs
Increasing accuracy and completeness of registers
Box 3: Background to accuracy and completeness
Figure 1: Completeness and accuracy of local government registers before and after transition to IER
Administrative and financial burdens
Administrative burdens placed on EROs during the 2019 UK Parliamentary election
Automatic registration and other modernising measures
Civic education and public engagement
People with disabilities and long-term health conditions
Government’s engagement activities
Box 4: The Government’s 5-year democratic engagement plan
Chapter 3: Annual canvass reform and wider administrative reforms
Implementing the annual canvass under IER
Annual canvass reform and data matching
Box 5: The proposal for annual canvass reform
Data sharing mechanisms under the annual canvass reform
Other administrative reforms in the Act (Part 2, Sections 14–23)
Overall views of Part 2 administrative changes
Extension of Parliamentary election timetable
Concurrent scheduling of Parish and Town Council elections
Reviews of polling districts and places in Great Britain
Notification of rejected postal votes
Provision for voters living abroad
Chapter 4: Ballot security and combatting electoral fraud
Box 6: IER and fraud reduction: the Government’s initial objectives
Overall incidence of electoral fraud
Table 2: Registration fraud cases as a percentage of total fraud investigations
Postal voting and wider electoral fraud issues
Investigations of fraud complaints
Fraud complaints in the judicial system
Implementing voter ID requirements at polling stations
Box 7: 2018 and 2019 Voter ID Pilots
Summary of Conclusions and Recommendations
Appendix 1: List of Members and declarations of interest
Appendix 4: Further Call for Evidence
Appendix 5: A Short History of Electoral Registration
Appendix 6: Contents of the Act
Appendix 7: Background to the post legislative scrutiny process
Appendix 10: Acronyms and abbreviations
Evidence is published online at https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/405/electoral-registration-and-administration-act-2013-committee and available for inspection at the Parliamentary Archives (020 7129 3074).
Q in footnotes refers to a question in oral evidence.
The prefixes ZRA and ERA refer to items of written evidence. The prefixes are interchangeable and the same evidence will be found under each number in both series.