Photo ID to vote — will the Government get away with it?

Last week’s Queen’s Speech included a renewed attempt to introduce a photo ID requirement to vote at UK polling stations. The Electoral Integrity Bill has been long trailed, first appearing in a Queen’s Speech two years ago; it is now taking centre stage again in the Government’s legislative agenda.

Not surprisingly, making the vote dependent on producing photo ID has provoked heated exchanges. The central argument revolves around the question of what is more damaging to democracy: the handful of votes fraudulently cast each year or the potentially large numbers of legitimate voters who may be prevented or deterred from voting by the cure? The Government argues that it is perfectly reasonable to expect a person to be able to prove they are who they say they are in a polling station. Others see nothing wrong with the current tried and tested system and a lot wrong with the alternative. Ruth Davidson, the former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, succinctly summed up her view. She described the proposals as “b******s”. Is photo ID a solution without a problem? 

In the face of an argument that seems to stack heavily on one side, the underlying question of motive arises and I have suggested here that this proposal could be viewed as part of a pattern of reforms to the way we vote, seeking party political advantage. The practice of the Republican Party in the US, where there is a long and ignoble history of voter suppression and manipulation of electoral processes for party advantage, is one obvious inspiration, which I have discussed here.

When a minister is questioned by the media their reply takes one of two forms: they either stick closely to a carefully prepared brief, setting out their party’s line on the issue, or they say the first thing that comes into their head. During the coverage of the Queen’s Speech a number of ministers were questioned about photo ID. One, unwisely, got into an argument about what form of identification is required at a post office to collect a parcel, claiming photo ID was required. Unwisely, because the interviewer had done their homework. The minister was wrong.

 Another minister, when questioned about some of the practical difficulties of having to produce photo ID, fled to that safe haven of “there will be pilots”. The minister was seemingly oblivious of the fact that there already have been pilots – twice, at both the 2018 and 2019 local elections. Indeed, the pilots have been instrumental in supplying the objectors with much hard evidence for the case against the use of photo ID. 

And then the Leader of the House — the affectionately styled “Honourable Member for the 19th century”, Jacob Rees-Mogg MP — entered the fray. At least he had actually thought about what he was saying. At first, he argued that it was a smart move on the part of the Government, dealing with a problem (voter fraud) before it became a problem — a pre-emptive strike. This was an argument which might have carried more weight if an upward trend of fraud had been identified, but the only trend has been from negligible numbers of fraud cases to more negligible numbers. He then turned to the sort of intervention that has earned him his sobriquet, pointing out that parliamentary rules prevent MPs wearing overcoats and hats when voting, to stop someone masquerading as an MP. There, if Parliament has a rule to stop impersonation, then it must be right and proper. He neglected to provide figures for either the number of known cases of imposters trying to creep through the voting lobbies disguised in overcoats and hats, or figures for the number of genuine MPs debarred from voting because they were disinclined to take off said overcoat and hat. The reason there are no figures may be very simple – that there aren’t any cases. Mr Rees-Mogg may well have inadvertently put his finger on another case of a solution without a problem. 

Alongside the case for the defence, what of the case for the prosecution? Here we are somewhat spoiled for choice, among a large number of individuals and organisations who have cried foul: the Electoral Reform Society (ERS), the Salvation Army, Stonewall, Age UK, Mencap, the RNIB, racial equality organisations and many more. The list is a long one, all seeking to defend the interests of the groups they represent who, the evidence suggests, will be disproportionately disadvantaged by photo ID. 

It is a numbers game, with figures for voters prevented from voting set against figures for fraud cases. On the former, the first set of pilots in 2018 provided some solid evidence. They were in just five local authority areas, involving voters in the hundreds of thousands. Varying sets of statistics were produced and the Electoral Commission (an independent government agency) carried out intensive research and assessment. There were no figures for electors who simply did not bother to attend a polling station because they knew they did not have the correct form of identification, but the ERS drew together the figures for those prevented from voting: “more than 1,000 voters across all pilot areas were turned away [from polling stations] for not having the correct form of ID… around 350 voters…did not return to vote”. 

But the Government and the Electoral Commission declared the pilots a success and repeated them in the following year, with similar results. On the number of fraud cases, the Electoral Commission publishes details. In 2019, a year in which there were a number of elections, including a general election, one man pleaded guilty to voting twice, once as himself and again as his son and was given a suspended sentence. Another man, who was not on the electoral register, accepted a caution from the police after voting as his father. Just two successful fraud cases out of tens of millions of voters. 

I have perhaps been unfair in not including the minister in the Cabinet Office responsible for taking this policy forward, Chloe Smith MP, in my quotes from Conservative ministers. In mounting a trenchant defence of the policy, she frequently cites the fact that photo ID has been required in Northern Ireland since 1985. But she fails to mention that the tradition in the polarised politics across the Irish Sea is somewhat different to that on the mainland and can be summed up by the time-honoured phrase “vote early, vote often”. At the 1983 general election in Northern Ireland, where less than a million voted, 949 people arrived at polling stations to find that a vote had already been cast in their name, and the police made 149 arrests for impersonation, resulting in 104 prosecutions. And these were not a large number of individual, casual one-off cases. A university study found that “caravans and safe houses were used where volunteers were dressed up with wigs, clothes and glasses and fleets of taxis were retained to ferry them around polling stations”. The study concluded: “Voting fraud in Northern Ireland has been widespread and systemic since the foundation of the state.” There was no serious opposition to the introduction of photo ID in Northern Ireland two years after the 1983 election.

I have suggested that the Conservative Party’s zeal for the photo ID policy in the face of overwhelming evidence of its detrimental effects (even from the extensive research specifically and creditably commissioned by the Government itself) may have something to do with the likely party allegiance of those whose votes may fall by the wayside. But the Labour Party nationally has been coy on the subject, taking, instead, a high-minded approach and avoiding mentioning the “elephant in the room” of party bias. However, in the debate at Westminster on the 2018 pilots, Ms Smith, the minister, went to the heart of the matter: “I wonder whether Labour Members have…come here [to the debate] with a different purpose in mind. Do they perhaps think that they are going to lose votes through this policy?” She went on to quote from a letter to a local newspaper “from a Labour party councillor who is concerned that this policy is going to affect ‘those most likely to vote Labour.’ Is not that the real story that we see in Labour Members’ concern? Are these not crocodile tears because they are concerned that they are going to lose votes that they perceive they own? I think that is a disgrace.” From her Labour shadow? Answer she did not.

Will anything knock the introduction of photo ID off course and from where could opposition to it come? In a previous article, I pointed to the backlash against the US state of Georgia’s introduction of a measure with the same name as the UK Government’s Bill, the Electoral Integrity Bill 2021. The intention of both Bills, many argue, is similar: to disadvantage and deter voters from social groups that did not support the ruling party. There, a highly vocal opposition came from corporate, cultural and sporting America. Will their equivalents on this side of the Atlantic follow suit? It remains to be seen whether the latest intervention from the US helps or hinders progress: Donald Trump has gone on record as an enthusiastic fan of the photo ID proposal. 

Here, the Conservatives have a seemingly unassailable 80-seat majority, but there are early signs that the fundamental signal being sent by this policy – that the Government simply does not trust its citizens – runs contrary to a cherished principle of British public life. It is one that has been held especially dear on Conservative benches. The Government’s response to the criticism that millions of people do not hold the standard forms of photo ID – passports, driving licences – is to require, as part of the proposals, local authorities to issue a specially produced photo “voting card”. To many, this looks like an identity card by the back door. The civil liberties campaigner and former Conservative cabinet minister, David Davis MP, joined his colleague, Ruth Davidson, in criticising the proposals, albeit in less colourful language, describing the plans as an “illiberal solution for a non-existent problem”. 

Will other Conservatives break ranks with their party on photo ID? One likely candidate would be the author of the memorable comment: “If I am ever asked…in any venue, public or private, to produce my ID card as evidence that I am who I say I am…then I will take that card out of my wallet and physically eat it in the presence of whatever emanation of the state has demanded I produce it.” The author of the quote? The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.

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