Letters oversight blamed for missing voters

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jan/16/letters-oversight-missing-voters

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An oversight by the Electoral Commission and the Cabinet Office may have led to a sharp fall in the number of 18-year-olds being put on the new electoral register, it has been claimed.

Ed Miliband went to Sheffield on Friday to launch a voter registration drive and said one million people had fallen off the electoral register in the past year.

He blamed the Cabinet Office, overseen by the deputy prime minister, for rushing ahead with a switch from household registration to individual voter registration. The Labour leader cited figures from the December 2014 electoral register as evidence of missing voters, many of them students in university towns.

But local government leaders said one previously unknown cause of the fall may have been the failure of the Cabinet Office and Electoral Commission to ask councils to ensure households informed them of anyone who turns 18 in 2015.

In the constituency of North Durham, represented by the Labour MP Kevan Jones, the number of people attaining the voting age fell from 630 last year to a statistically improbable 114 this year. It appears that only 52% of people who turn 18 during the latest electoral register period were transferred to the new individual electoral register, down from 86% of attainers being included in the 2013 register, according to the Electoral Commission.

Durham council officers told Jones in an email: “The problem in relation to attainers is not limited to Durham and seems to have arisen because of the design of the letters which elections teams were required to send out to homes saying that residents had been confirmed by the DWP live run. These letters are designed by Cabinet Office and the Electoral Commission. If electors were matched with Department for Work and Pensions records, they received letters confirming the match.

“Whilst the letters requested that the recipients inform the elections office of any new residents in the household, they did not contain the section that had been part of previous canvass letters: a specific section inviting the householder to fill in the details and dates of birth of 16- to 17-year-olds. Thus attainers not previously identified will have slipped under the radar nationally.”

This month the Cabinet Office set aside nearly £10m for councils to launch local registration drives, and it is now expected that councils will try to rectify the error about younger voters. In most cases the extra funding will not cover the cost of sending an extra letter to voters.

The Electoral Commission insists the December figures on the size of the electoral roll are just a snapshot and it will produce a fuller survey in February after efforts have been made by the local electoral registration officers and universities to register voters in time for the May elections.

It says 90% of voters have been automatically transferred from the old household register to the new individual register, mainly by matching the old electoral roll with DWP records.

Universities are no longer allowed to block-register students to vote, although students may still be on the register for their home address.

Miliband has written to university vice-chancellors, electoral registration officers and the Election Commission urging them to do all they can to help with an online registration drive. He has asked for ward-by-ward information about rates of registration, to target areas with significant drop-off.

It is widely accepted that the electoral register is becoming less accurate as disproportionately large numbers of young people and those in private rented accommodation fall off the register. Estimates vary, but as many as seven million people are currently off the register, and that number may now increase.

The Conservatives say they would redraw the constituency boundaries in time for the 2020 election on the basis of an electoral register frozen in December 2015, but Labour says this is unnecessarily early in view of the problems with the register.

The boundary review blocked by MPs in this parliament is due to start in 2017, but there are fears that it will be undertaken on the basis on a skewed register from which millions of voters are excluded.

The review is designed to reduce the number of constituencies from 650 to 600 and make them more equal in size. More than 40% of UK constituencies vary by more than 5% from the average-sized constituency. For instance, in December 2013 Manchester Central had 95,000 electors and North West Cambridgeshire had 91,000, while Wirral West had 54,800.

A Cabinet Office spokesman said: “This is categorically not true. The form sent to households asks for information about all eligible electors, including people aged 16 and above. We have offered local authorities unprecedented support throughout this transition and will continue to do so in the run up to the general election. Individual electoral registration is both increasing the accuracy of the register and giving people more control and ownership over the process.”