Who will benefit the most from new rules about voter ID?

The announcement about giving the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds in all UK elections has obviously caused huge excitement, and some controversy. However, the experts say that the number of new voters will in practice be very small, and that it will make only a marginal difference to the result of a general election – because some won’t vote, and there’s no God-given law about them all voting Labour.

Much more significant are the new rules on voter ID. The range of acceptable documents will be widened to include, for example, bank cards. Whatever the advantage it might bestow on any particular party at an election, proponents say it will boost turnout, and engagement with the democratic process...

The government says its elections bill will allow people to use UK-issued bank cards as proof of identity, and of course, these do not usually carry an image of the user. In addition, there will be “more digital options to support voters and polling station staff, including allowing accepted IDs such as the Veteran Card and UK driving licence to be used at polling stations when they become available in digital format”.

The cynics say it is because it will benefit Labour disproportionately. Others say that, true or not, that’s less important than allowing people to vote, and that the threat of electoral fraud has been greatly exaggerated.

Historically, according to the Electoral Commission and the academics, there’s been little in Great Britain even in local elections, and it is virtually unknown in general elections. Where it has cropped up, such as in Tower Hamlets, it has been dealt with.

The counterclaim is that photo ID was brought in by the Conservatives in the last parliament in order to help them and to suppress the Labour vote. A point lost to history is that the 2019 Conservative manifesto did not specify “photo” ID as the preferred option. (Northern Ireland has needed photo ID for far longer, because of much more voter “personation”. Hence the local slogan “Vote early, vote often”.)

Probably in the hundreds of thousands, and maybe more. The polling company More in Common say that, on the basis of polling after the last election, more than 850,000 would have been turned away at the polling station for lack of ID, and – given that some returned – perhaps 400,000 lost their vote.

It affected voters from ethnic minority groups disproportionately: the poll suggested that 6.5 per cent of voters of colour were turned away from a polling booth at least once, compared with 2.5 per cent of white voters.

But of course, no one really has any idea how many voters didn’t even bother to go to the polls who wished to, because they knew they didn’t have the necessary ID – or they did but it had some minor discrepancy, such as a variation in their first name or the precise spelling of their surname.

Local council “greeters” posted outside polling stations may also have stopped people from entering the premises, and thus these would-be voters would have gone unnoticed by the local election officials or the Electoral Commission.

The government says that an increasingly automated voter registration system will also make it easier for people to register to vote, and will reduce the need for them to fill out their details across different government services on multiple occasions.

On balance, Labour, because of its relatively high vote among some ethnic minorities; but also, for that same reason, the Corbynite independents who took seats from Labour in strongly Muslim areas even in a strong year such as 2024. Reform UK might also see some benefit, because their vote is skewed towards more disadvantaged places, where turnouts are traditionally low. Automated registration among disaffected non-voters might give them a bit of a boost.

No. As with votes at 16, the numbers aren’t going to make that much of a difference, and in our present confused four- or five-party system, it’s hard to see anyone gaining a decisive advantage. And voting allegiances by age, class and ethnicity, for example, can shift over time anyway. But in a very close contest, who knows?

This seems to be another problem for turnout. The government says of last July: “Overall, 8 per cent of non-voters mentioned they did not vote because of an issue related to their postal vote (such as missing the deadline to apply, forms arriving late and forgetting to send their postal vote) – with this figure rising to 13 per cent in Scotland and Wales.”

The deterioration in the postal system has added fresh challenges to a method of voting many find essential, or more convenient. So the proposal is to change the deadline in Great Britain to apply for a postal vote, moving it from 11 to 14 working days before a poll, thereby providing more time between the application deadline and polling day.

This only became much of an issue in Britain after the contested 2020 US presidential election, and Donald Trump’s unfounded allegations that it was rigged. Nigel Farage and Reform UK make a big deal of it, and Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, has raised it again in the Commons this week, stating: “I have seen people carrying bag-loads of postal votes to a polling station on election day.” The relevant minister, Rushanara Ali, told him to tell the police.