UK Government must develop automatic electoral registration, Electoral Commission says

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The UK needs to develop automatic or direct voter registration processes and offer a system that lets people check whether they are registered online, the Electoral Commission has said.

In its final report on the transition to individual electoral registration rather than registration as a household, the commission said that the UK Government must consider new ways of modernising voter registration.

The Electoral Commission report noted that although there had been significant progress in making sure voters were properly registered through the new system, with local government and parliamentary registers 91 per cent accurate, the current method of electoral registration is not sustainable in the long term.

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It called for further improvements to registration, as well as saying that the Government must take action quickly, because the UK “cannot wait for more than a decade for the next phase of change to be delivered”.

It also emphasised that such changes would be even more important due to reductions to local authority budgets.

The new system proposed by the commission is one that uses trusted public data to remain accurate without relying on individuals, and that makes it easier for voters to make sure their information is accurate, especially before elections and referenda.

“We now want to see positive action to develop new ways of compiling and maintaining electoral registers in the UK, in particular to enable Electoral Registration Officers to make better use of available, trusted data to keep registers up to date,” the report states.

“We believe it is time to move away from a system which relies on electors taking steps to register themselves, and instead develop automatic or direct enrolment processes which have the potential to deliver more accurate and complete electoral registers more efficiently than current resource intensive canvass processes.”

The Government should start a programme of feasibility studies of an automatic system, looking at the administrative, legal and infrastructure implications of managing new systems, the commission says.

Automatic systems might include using local government data to register people who move house – with the majority of people who move doing so within one local authority area – or by registering 16 and 17-year-olds as they are allocated a national insurance number and retaining the information until they are eligible to vote.

The system should also be able to identify and remove duplicate entries, the report said.

The Electoral Commission is carrying out a strategic review of its future work, which will include further thoughts on delivering a modern electoral register, to be published by the end of 2016.