If our current politics allowed us to talk about anything other than Brexit, we might have noticed the government surreptitiously trialling voter ID laws for the upcoming local elections.
These laws, which require people to produce photographic ID before they can vote, are already in place in the US, and data collected so far on their impact suggests they reduce turnout among black, Hispanic and working-class voters.
The Cabinet Office, adopting a hue of serene reasonableness, suggests that since we already need photo ID to collect packages from the post office, we should also present it at the ballot box. But this is a poor analogy. A more accurate way of describing voter ID laws is to imagine the post office demanding ID as a deliberate measure to prevent certain ethnic or economic groups from picking up their mail, because, for some reason, the post office has become drunk on power.
See, the snag with the government’s plans is that voter fraud isn’t actually a problem in this country. Data collected by the Electoral Commission suggests there were 28 cases of voter fraud in 2017. Of course it’s hard to collect numbers on this issue, so let’s imagine the true figure is actually double that. This would mean 0.0008% of the UK electorate committed voter fraud. For this paltry sum, the government is planning on disenfranchising the 7.5% of the electorate who don’t have ID – or 3.5 million people, the majority of whom are likely to be from disadvantaged and BAME backgrounds.
In light of these facts, do we honestly believe that voter ID laws are necessary? Of course not. The government must be introducing them for another, unspoken reason. And it seems pretty obvious what this is: to reduce the size of the Labour vote. It can’t be mere coincidence that the very groups likely to be disenfranchised by this move are also the same ones that tend to vote Labour.
The move also follows a 2015 decision to introduce individual voter registration, which led to 1 million people dropping off the electoral register. Most of these voters were students and young people – and guess who they tend to vote for. In fact, the Independent found that the Conservative party only posted once on its social media platforms encouraging people to register to vote for the 2017 election – compared with Labour, which devoted over a third of its posts to the same issue before the deadline. What kind of a party calls a general election it doesn’t want people to participate in?
Conservative attempts to suppress votes go hand-in-hand with their repeated attempts at gerrymandering. These acts are straight out of the Republican playbook in the US: take away people’s democratic rights and rig the system in such a way that you can keep hold of power whether the population likes it or not. But the humiliating shambles that was the 2017 snap election should be evidence enough that the Tories aren’t simply free to accrue as much power as they want. The public can and should disrupt these banana republic shenanigans. If the Conservative party can’t win power through legitimate democratic means, then perhaps it doesn’t deserve power at all.