The switch to individual registration is a success

****

Not that you'd think this listening to Gloria De Piero, Labour's "shadow minister for making sure the register is loaded with ghost voters" (or whatever her title is):

The shadow minister for electoral registration, Gloria De Piero, said the figures show 1.8% of voters have left the register since the move to IER. Ms De Piero said the drop-off had been particularly high in areas with a large proportion of students.

A while ago the whole exercise was opposed by Labour with cries of gerrymandering and accusations of some kind of evil Tory fix. It was, of course, nothing of the sort as these latest scandalous figures tell us. If the register has declined by less than 2% this is an indication that the result of the new system is a cleaner, more accurate and up-to-date system - a triumph really.

Moreover, most of the loss is accounted for by students not being registered in the place where they are students. This is (as a moment's thought might suggest) not necessarily an indication that they aren't registered but rather that they are registered at their home address - where mum and dad live:

"Among those students who were on the electoral roll turnout was relatively high. Yet it appears that many of them opted to vote at home rather than at their place of study..."

So the real figure - one we can't know without an expensive merge-purge of the whole UK register - for decline is likely to be significantly lower than 800,000. What seems to happen is that students who are registered in South Hams (to pick a place at random) then don't bother registering in Leeds North West.

From a scandal where 'millions' were going to lose the chance of voting because of the evil Tories we have reached a point where the transfer to a system of individual registration has resulted in almost no net reduction in the numbers registered. And remember that every person with an address who is receiving benefits of any sort (housing, child, JSA, in work) is automatically registered because that evil Tory government allowed, for the first time, DWP data to be shared with Councils for the purpose of registering people to vote.

What has happened is that local councils have been forced to spend time, effort and money getting the register accurate. Hundreds of thousands of ghost names - some fraudulent but mostly just the result of sloppy electoral registration - have gone but are replaced by the accurate collection of names of individuals who actually live at a given address. Students are almost the only group (single people in low paid work and rented housing but not receiving benefits being the other) that slip through the system.

The switch to individual registration has been a success.

....

Ah, that apathy thing again...

****

Excitement at the discovery that more English 18 year olds are on Facebook than registered to vote.

Officials expressed concern yesterday after figures revealed that Facebook has 1.08million 18-year-old users in Britain, compared with just over half a million who have reached voting age in the past year and registered on the electoral roll.

Lots of chatter - some of it relevent, some nonsense about making it easier to register (how about via Facebook - now that's a thought) and about "engaging" with young people via social media. No-one asks whether this discovery is either new or much of an issue. After all, if voting becomes something of concern, something people are concerned about, something that will make a difference, then rest assured that people will not only register to vote but will queue up outside the polling station to exercise this democratic liberty.

The problem we have (and remember that half of UK adults didn't vote in the 2010 election) is that loads of people simply don't see the point of voting - it doesn't seem to matter much to them or make the slightest bit of difference to their lives. So they don't bother.

And we (that is the politicians) don't care either - or we'd be hanging around at student digs and taking registration forms to sixth form classrooms.

...

Voter registration...

****

I'm convinced that we need individual voter registration. So, it's a bit of a pain for my son and other students but that's the price of democracy. A democracy compromised by the explosion of deception, cheating and downright fraud, much of it around registration.

Yet the Labour Party - egged on by MPs for inner city constituencies - are adamant that such an idea is an offence to democracy. We must continue with the situation where one person fills in the registration form for everyone living at an address. Here's one such MP:

However, the evidence is that, without mums, many young people will not register to vote: when ‘individual registration’ was introduced in Northern Ireland, the register collapsed by 11 per cent, and the Electoral Commission says this ‘adversely affected’ disadvantaged groups like the young, the poor, ethnic minorities, and those with disabilities.

What is so hard about this? Are Labour voters so unable or unwilling to complete a simple form (and it is simple)?

Or is it really a worry about something else?

....

Idiots revisited (again)

***

A while ago I wrote in praise of idiots about those ordinary people who don’t partake of politics:

The ancient Greeks used their word for ‘private’ as a derogatory term for someone who took no part in “public affairs”. That word ἴδιος (idios) is the root for our term for a stupid person – idiot. Today – in the Greek sense – most of us are idiots and I think this represents progress rather than a problem. That barely more that a third of Bingley Rural electors took the opportunity to vote last time I stood isn’t a disaster and those people are well aware of the purpose and value of voting - which I guess is why most of them don’t bother

I also made the point that these folk don’t take part because they don’t see the point. What exactly is going to change in their lives if one patronising besuited politician is replaced by a different patronising besuited politician wearing a different badge? Now not everyone agrees with me – here’s Dick Puddlecote:

As someone who engages with many everyday working people on a daily basis, both professionally and in my spare time, THE most oft-repeated phrase I hear is "I don't do politics".

They'll all advance their thoughts about the ills of the world, though. After all, it's human nature. Van drivers, bricklayers, checkout girls, roofers, teaching assistants, spark's mates, cabbies, labourers, nursery nurses, road workers, cleaners, and the unemployed - they all have opinions. And most of them feel totally ignored.

But then again, a lot of them say they 'don't do politics'.

Dick worries that this active disengagement results in politicians directing their efforts to a more reliable (so far as turning up is concerned) group of voters – and that group of voters will not do anything for the ‘poor’. I have some sympathy with that viewpoint – why else to we subsidise opera and not the club circuit and prioritise sports like rowing and sailing ahead of boxing or rugby league?

However, this recent election – the most tightly fought, attention-grabbing, important, change-making (select your own superlative) – reinforced what I said and, in its way, Dick’s concerns as well. Despite the leaders’ debates, despite a sense that there was a chance to change something, despite wall-to-wall media coverage of Cleggmania – despite all this the turnout at the election was still lower than at every election since 1945 bar 2001 and 2005.

Thirty-five out of every hundred electors didn’t make it to the polls – were either disinterested, disengaged, uninspired or simply not bothered. And this covers up staggering levels of non-registration – people who don’t even give themselves a chance to vote at all. Here’s the Electoral Commission report on the subject:

Evidence available from electoral statistics and surveys of levels of response to the annual canvass of electors suggests that there was a decline in registration levels from the late 1990s to 2006. The same evidence base suggests that the registers have stabilised since 2006, although it is likely that the completeness of the registers has declined since the last national estimate in 2000.

In the late 1990s around 10% of people weren’t registered – the Commission say the situation is now worse. In some places up to 20% of people are not registered to vote and concerns about false registration are making local authorities tighten up registration by removing non-respondents more quickly from the register. And, not surprisingly, the three groups most likely not to register are young people (over half of 17-26 year olds are not registered), private sector tenants (49%) and immigrant groups (31%).

So if 20% aren’t registered and only 65% of the remainder bother voting the real turnout in the election was just 52% - barely half the population bothering with the most closely-fought election in 30 years. Says it all really!

....