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One Million British Would-Be Voters Have Been Quietly Kicked off the Electoral Register

A change to the way people in the UK register to vote has resulted in a lot of young people, poor people, and ethnic minorities being excluded from the list without realizing it.

Photo by John Keane

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Today, a Facebook ad or promoted Tweet is supposed to have popped up on every UK adult's feed, courtesy of the Electoral Commission. This has been timed to coincide with "National Voter Registration Day"—the culmination of a week-long campaign to get people to register or re-register to vote. Bite the Ballot, an organization trying to rock the youth vote, has called this a "national day of celebration," like a Royal Wedding or something.

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But while the Electoral Commission tries to convince people to act upon their varying levels of disdain for David Cameron and Ed Miliband, a new form of registration may have caused almost a million people to drop quietly off the electoral register. That's more than the entire UKIP vote at the last election. When the new registration system comes fully into effect after May, it could cause another three or four million voters to drop off. That's the equivalent of half of the Labour vote at the last election. This is according to research by anti-extremism advocacy group Hope Not Hate (HNH).

Individual Electoral Registration (IER), which began to take effect for new registrants over the summer, requires everybody to register themselves. Previously, many people could be registered automatically by someone in their house, their university, or care home. They can't do that any more, and many won't realize. And as the system is re-jigged, those whose details don't match up to more recent tax or benefits records will be dropped off the register.

The idea was to prevent electoral fraud, but the knock on effect has been one million fewer people on the register compared to last year—the biggest drop off from the register in UK history.

Nick Lowles from HNH explained to me how with the next election being particularly tight, this could turn out to be quite a big deal. "Fifteen of the 50 key marginal seats have got far more people dropping off than the marginal difference between [the two leading parties]." For instance in Lancaster, where just 22 of 7,500 students are registered to vote, there are "143 votes difference between the Tories, who hold the seat, and Labor." Because of this, Nick explained, it's clear that, "the drop off in register is going to have a major impact in the outcome in this election."

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"Things are particularly bad in London," Nick continued, giving the example of Brent, where 35 percent of people on the old electoral register have been removed. "[In Brent] the council has a few months to try and get those people on the register. But they only have six members of staff in their electoral services department, [so] the chances are that the vast majority of those people aren't going to re-register before May."

And while local authorities have been given more money for voter drives, this isn't ring-fenced, meaning there's nothing to stop them using this to plug shortfalls in other funding.

Much like every unintended consequence of virtually every policy, ever, the fall out from the change to IER is expected to affect people who are already marginalized by society the most. "It's going to disproportionately impact on the poor, the young, the very old and transient, new communities," Nick said.

"We're seeing, in many places in the country, an 80 percent drop off in young people joining the register," Nick explained, citing 17-year-olds joining—or not joining—the register for the first time and students as the reason for this. "Students move around a lot more, they're transient… that makes it difficult both for the electoral services to find them and to register them," he said, "they also aren't as clued up in terms of voter registration and knowing what you have to do."

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The same applies to poorer people, who often also live in cheap, private-rented accommodation and have to move around a lot. This makes keeping track of them difficult. And, as Nick pointed out, for people struggling to keep up with rent, bills, and whatever else, "registering to vote is not their priority."

The research has also flagged up particular concerns about recent immigrant communities, where people may need to register to vote for the first time and not be aware that they have to do so themselves. And for ethnic minority communities, the research found that the Electoral Commission is much like a newscaster struggling to pronounce a foreign interviewee's name: discrepancies in the spelling or ordering of names could result in many people falling off the register.

In the short term, more registration drives might help. HNH are calling for the government to target further education colleges and allow universities and care homes to block register residents immediately, but later on they also want the government to incorporate voter registration into other forms of data collection, including passports, driving licenses, council tax collection, school enrollment, pensions, and benefits.

Being struck off the register could politically disenfranchise people, which could, in turn, stoke extremism. Nick believes that people dropping off the electoral register due to IER could exacerbate "a much wider issue about disengagement with party politics… We've been working in communities where the BNP have been strong or the English Defense League," Nick said. "[Our fear is that] in the long term this [people dropping off the electoral register] increases disengagement with the political process and increases the chances that extremists can exploit increasingly alienated communities."

I asked Nick if he was sure he had it the right way around—perhaps the people who haven't registered might be people who wouldn't vote anyway. Nick harked back to the example of Lancaster, where only 22 of 7,500 students are currently registered to vote. "There's a lower student turnout than the population in general," he conceded, "but you still get 30 percent of students voting. When you've only got 22 out of 7,500 people on the register, that clearly means there are people who in the previous election would have voted, who aren't going to be able to vote in this election."

Whether or not people want to vote is up to them. But, Nick said, "the fact that a million people won't even be on the register, [so] won't even be able to make the choice about whether they vote or not, is a sad day for our democracy." Maybe that National Voter Registration Day celebratory bunting is a bit premature.

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