Glyn Ford on the dangers of voter suppression and a flawed IPPR report proposing ways to make voting easier with an extended electorate.
Both Parties in the US cheat the democratic system with voter suppression, gerrymandering and a tangle of rules and regulations designed to obstruct and confound the ‘wrong’ voters and candidates, making it difficult to vote and harder to stand. Only the Republicans, with more gall and less guilt, do it better and on an industrial scale. Britain’s Tories learnt the lessons and imposed the need for photo ID designed more as procedural malware to fend off non-Tory voters than address mythical electoral fraud. Now there are those in the upper echelons of the Labour Party who want to reverse-engineer the process to benefit the left. One example applies to casual voters, those who rarely but occasionally vote. This cohort is currently trending towards Farage and Reform, so the thinking is let’s suppress this vote by raising the barrier to postal voting by going back to the bad old days of requiring a doctor’s signature.
Wrong! The strength of our democracy is founded on inclusion and not any attempt to surreptitiously sieve reliable Labour wheat from indecisive chaff. Back in January the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) published Modernising Elections; How to Get Voters Back. The Report wilfully ignores two elephants in the room in setting aside any discussion of either proportional representation and the abolition of the House of Lords. Nevertheless, for those willing to settle for the better over the best, the Report makes a series of powerful political points that Labour should act on early in this Parliament. For our current broken system skews politics to the right, prejudicing policy away from the needy and the most deserving.
The Report’s starting point – illustrated by a series of colourful graphs and charts – is falling turnout and a sharp growth in voting gaps. The stale and pale, the house owner, and the graduate increasingly swamp their counterparts. OAPs outvote single mothers and the poor by increasing margins. Amongst registered 18-19 year-olds, 60% vote, while for the over 65s it’s 96%. That’s exactly why the triple-lock on pensions will continue to have priority over alleviating rising child poverty by abandoning the Tory two-child benefit cap. Voter ID saw 16,000 voters turned away and countless more who chose because of it not to turn up.
But none of the gaps yawn as wide as the iniquitous gap between the registered voter and their eligible but unregistered counterpart. There are an estimated 7-8 million eligible voters absent from the register. These are comprised of the usual suspects; the young, the poor and the black. The constituency of New Forest West has a population of 85,000 while Birmingham Ladywood accommodates 152,000 – 80% bigger. Nevertheless, Shabana Mahmoud and her constituents have only the same voice as that of Sir Desmond Swayne, seriously distorting the public message. Automatic voter registration – as is common in many EU Member States – would be a step in the right direction alongside an Election Bill to re-draw UK Constituency boundaries to reflect equal populations rather than equal numbers of registered electors. In addition, those with a direct vested interest in the success of Britain, our five million tax-paying foreign permanent residents, surely should have as much say as the three million non-UK taxpaying Brits currently living abroad.
The IPPR’s other concern, apart from making voting easier, is to make it more worthwhile, aware of the growing belief by electors that they either have no, or at best a minor, stake in the system as it stands. This is born out in the Report. Public perception currently is that those with the most influence over government are in descending order of importance: donors 37%, business 20%, lobbyists 13%, newspapers 12% and last, and by all means least, the voters 4%. Cutting the legs off donors would be a start. IPPR suggests limiting donations to £100,000 per annum from any one individual. One addendum might be to add that those donating such an amount should be disbarred from nomination to the House of Lords for a decade. That would demonstrate altruism over self-interest.
The Report’s fundamental flaw in some of its recommendations is that it has firmly got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It obsesses about raising turnout over participation, and then compounds the problem with proposals that don’t add up. There is the worthy – but innumerable – demand for lowering the voting age to sixteen as part of this process. Yet the young, like the eligible, but unregistered, have a lower propensity to vote than the old and the registered. These proposals will lower, not raise, turnout. The target to defend democracy is to raise participation not percentages. Rather than gaming percentages in a twisted system, the end is raising numbers.
Interestingly, the Report’s third and final denial is politics. Inspecting all the graphs of declining participation and widening differentials across the decades, there is a common inflection point back in 2017 when things only got better. Apart from well-needed technical tinkering, these illustrate that the alternative way to enhance interest and turnout is when there is clear red water between the offerings of the major parties rather than the mantras of more efficiency and less dissolution. Yet it was a step too far to imagine the IPPR concluding that more Jeremys might be as successful in helping address their concerns as more procedural jiggling.