Bringing voter sign up to the people

Close to one million voters – many of them young, minorities and private renters – have fallen off the electoral register, according to Electoral Commission figures released on Tuesday (February 26). The fall represents a 2 per cent tumble in overall voter registration numbers.

 
The worrying drop in registered voters on the eve of a general election in May, thought to be the closest race in decades, comes on the heels of the NoVoteNoVoice campaign’s nationwide voter registration drive.

 
The campaign, a coalition between Unite and groups including Hope Not Hate, the Daily Mirror, Operation Disabled Vote and Operation Black Vote, will kick off its whistle stop bus tour this Sunday (March 1).

 
The tour will visit 15 cities up and down the country, including Hastings, Southampton, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester and Newcastle, among others.

 
Unite campaigns officer Colin Stuart said the registration drive is decidedly non-party political.

 
“Each of the parties has their own registration drives, motivated to suit their own political ends,” Stuart said. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but what we’re doing is a unique. We are deliberately going into towns and cities where a good portion of the population has given up on politics entirely, where registration levels are dismally low, some as low as 40 per cent.

 
“It’s these places, where essentially no one else wants to go, where we plan to come in and galvanise people. We’ll stop in each city or town and go into workplaces, universities and so on with a bit of a fanfare, dedicating the whole day to encouraging people to participate in politics once again.”

 
Fighting disenfranchisement

 
The Electoral Commission believes that some of the drop in registered voters can be attributed to changes in the way students are registered.

 
Under new registration rules, called Individual Electoral Registration (IER), universities cannot block register students living in halls, so they must now register themselves individually.

 
Indeed, the largest drops in registered voters in the Electoral Commission’s new figures have been in areas with dense student populations.

 
For example, in Cardiff, 23,500 people have fallen off the register, representing an astounding 10 per cent drop. Newcastle has seen 8,000 disappear from the register, with one ward reporting a 50 per cent tumble in registered voters.

 
Critics of IER believe that the new rules were deliberately introduced by a Tory-led government with the express purpose of disenfranchising those who are more likely to lean left politically.

 
The coalition government quickly pushed the legislation through last year, arguing that the change was needed to prevent voter fraud.

 
However, according to the Electoral Commission itself, which was highly critical of the introduction of IER, there have been only ten proven cases of voter fraud in the past four years. And there’s been little indication that the new system would help reduce what negligible fraud does exist.

 
Proponents of the recent changes hail the new online registration facility, which enables people to register to vote in a matter of minutes. They say IER places greater responsibility on individuals to register themselves. If they aren’t registered, the argument goes, they have only themselves to blame.

 
Stuart asserted that IER in itself is not a bad thing but criticises the rushed way in which the changes were introduced.

 
“Online registration could easily have been introduced separately from Individual Voter Registration, or it could have been more slowly phased in,” he said.

 
“On the one hand, you can say that those who fail to register have no one but themselves to blame, that they’re lazy,” he added. “But we take the view that many of those not on the register were never asked to vote, they’ve never been told that their vote will and can make a difference.”

 
Hidden potential

 
One of the groups being hit hardest by changes in voter registration – young people – are already much less likely to vote than their older counterparts.

 
In the last general election in 2010, little more than half of registered voters between the ages of 18 and 24 cast their ballot, compared to 62 per cent for all other age groups.

 
The reasons for this lack of political participation among the nation’s youth are not quite clear.

 
While many speculate that low voter turnout among young people can be attributed to nothing more than apathy, a new Daily Mirror poll indicates that young people do care – they simply feel as though none of the political parties speaks to them and their concerns.

 
Nearly three-quarters of those polled said they were much more likely to vote if they believed that it would make a difference to their lives, with many respondents saying that politicians focus too much on immigration and not enough on education and job opportunities.

 
No matter the reasons for chronically low voter turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds, the upcoming election could very well be decided by the nation’s youth – if, that is, they get out and vote.

 
According to a recent report from the Guardian, of the 35 seats where at least 20 per cent of the voting age population is under 25, more than half of these seats are considered marginals. Foremost among these seats is Sheffield Central, where almost forty percent of eligible voters are between 18 and 24.

 
These figures indicate that a strong youth turnout has the hidden potential to make a decided difference come May 7.

 
For those who are reluctant to cast their ballot, Stuart argues that no one benefits from staying at home on election day.

 
“In the last general election, turnout was 65 per cent,” he said. “If the remaining 35 per cent had all voted, the outcome of the election would have been entirely different. There is absolutely no area in the UK where your vote doesn’t matter.”

 
Are you registered to vote? Don’t wait until the deadline (April 20) to find out.

 
Register here in less than five minutes, and visit Unite’s #NoVoteNoVoice website for more information about how you can get involved.