Individual registration excludes voters…


David Maples, Lambeth Socialist Party

Almost a million fewer people are registered to vote than last year – another barrier to anti-establishment campaigners in elections. The Con-Dem government replaced the flawed traditional household registration system, where an estimated six million people were not registered, with individual electoral registration (IER).

This is no answer. People who move frequently are more likely to go unregistered under IER. Lambeth council says that each year, during the electoral registration canvass, it would expect to add 40,000 people newly eligible to vote, and delete 40,000 who are no longer eligible (moved, died etc).

This year, it reports, only around 10,000 people have been added and 10,000 deleted. So, 30,000 people on the register should not be entitled to vote and a further 30,000 who should be eligible are missing.

What’s more, while Lambeth recorded 5,000 additional properties, the electorate has declined by 8,500. This is in a council where the Electoral Services Team goes to significant lengths to identify electors. IER is another obstacle to voting.

Funding

Lambeth’s usual £200,000 expenditure on the canvass, had increased this time to over £450,000. But when the one-off Home Off-ice funding ceases, the numbers on the electoral register will fall further.

Who benefits from lower registration? Parties that rely on older settled voters, not those worst hit by austerity, from students to those hit by the bedroom tax.

Scotland’s Independence Referendum showed electoral registration can surge when people feel a real prospect of change.

Anyone with a national insurance number and who meets all the other already established criteria and is not already registered, should be able to register to vote. And as in the Scottish Referendum, the voting age should be reduced to 16.


…but socialist politics encourages them!

Getting young people registered to vote can be difficult, but the best way to do it is to offer something worth voting for!

In Liverpool, students who have been selected to stand for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) at May’s local elections welcomed the voter registration drive at the city’s John Moores University (JMU).

TUSC’s key student policies for free education include guaranteed employment, and affordable accommodation.

Jack Yarlett, 19 year old history student at JMU, said: “I’m supporting TUSC because I want a party run for and by young and working-class people. I want an end to tuition fees, an end to high rents and decent pay and conditions for higher education staff.”

India Taylor, third-year undergraduate at University of Liverpool, said: “I support the TUSC proposal to scrap student fees because education is a civil liberty that should be free for all people at all times.

“Education creates social mobility which is being stifled by imposing crippling student debt. Education is now a commodity that is bought for the price of £27,000.”

Merseyside TUSC