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Welcome to the world of unintended consequences. Voter registration is not an issue to set the public pulse racing but it is at core of our democratic process. For most of the last century we have coped with household registration where a self designated ‘head of household' completed the registration forms for everyone resident and eligible to vote. Changing social values and some well documented cases of electoral fraud generated a case for individual registration. A perennial hobby horse of the Electoral Commission since 2003, it was passed into legislation by Harriet Harman in one of the last acts of the Labour Government. Individual electoral registration (IER) may or may not be a good thing but the way that the last two governments and the Electoral Commission have proceeded to prepare for its introduction has been little short of disastrous. The onus has been put on cash-strapped local councils to implement the change. The Electoral Commission undertook a pilot in 2013 which tried to match the names of those on the current register with those retained on the Department of Works and Pensions database. Everyone seemed pleased with a 71% data match. But that meant upwards of nine million current voters are not matched. The Cabinet Office is throwing money at the problem but that money tap will stop soon after the general election. Despite the bluster of the Electoral Commission they have little effective power to force councils who – through money or malice – chose to make little effort to track the missing voters after 2015. And that is when the real consequences begin. We draw our juries from the Electoral Register, but a deficient register means that we can no longer guarantee representative juries with all the consequences for our justice system. Moreover a review of the parliamentary boundaries is overdue and will be based on those registered, not actual population. We already know IER impacts differentially amongst different parts of the country and population. As our urban population is the most mobile in Europe we face a significant shift in parliamentary constituencies from the towns to the shires. So there you have it – a well intentioned reform will lead to a collapse of the principle of balanced juries and a gross distortion of our political system. And guess who will get the blame…Don't say you weren't warned. Paul Wheeler is director of the Political Skills Forum

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Soapbox by Paul Wheeler

By Paul Wheeler | 20 May 2014

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