Exclusive: All-party report on rules governing 2023 local elections calls voter ID system a ‘poisoned cure’
Is anyone surprised? It’s pretty universally understood that this is the outcome when you add restrictions to voting.
So universally understood, I struggle to see any way this wasn’t the goal
Is it universally understood? By whom? In the US sure, but in my country it’s always been mandatory to ID yourself when voting. It kind of makes sense to me.
I also see a lot of weasel wording in this article. “Anecdotal evidence … suggested some people may have been unfairly treated because of their race.” and it quotes a single case of a lady with a disability that was denied entry.
It does also list a number of legitimate concerns, but those are not inherent to the concept of voter id but rather (intentionally?) poor implementation.
I don’t trust the tories any further than I can throw them and I’d happily believe they’re deliberately trying to exclude some groups but this article is very poorly written and the guardian feels like it’s falling more and more into clickbait/ragebait territory.
No fucking shit.
Still, they don’t recommend repealing it. They said that more forms of ID need to be accepted.
Morons!
The stupid thing is that if you consider what would need to happen to make in-person electoral fraud happen on a large enough scale to shift an election… it would be bloody obvious that it was happening. The people working at polling stations are going to notice if the same person turns up to vote as 20 different people, and they’re also going to notice if the real person turns up as well as someone pretending to be them. You literally couldn’t hide hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes arising from impersonation.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Controversial rules governing voter identification led to racial and disability discrimination at this year’s local elections in England, according to a damning report co-written by one of the former ministers responsible for introducing them.
MPs and peers on the all-party parliamentary group on democracy and the constitution will publish a report on Monday saying that the rules caused more harm than they prevented when they came into force in May, and will call for changes, including the acceptance of a greater range of ID documents.
The report was co-authored by Sir Robert Buckland, who was justice minister in 2021 when the bill to introduce the rules was first launched in parliament, and who subsequently helped vote them through.
The report says: “Their decision in that instance was … clearly discriminatory (and potentially unlawful) because they denied Andrea Barratt the right to cast a ballot purely on the basis of circumstances which arose as a direct result of a disability.”
An interim study published by the Electoral Commission earlier this year found at least 14,000 people had been denied a vote because they lacked the correct form of ID.
The report’s authors call for ministers to broaden the types of documents that can be accepted as identification, and to allow those who fail ID checks to sign a legally binding declaration instead confirming their identity.
The original article contains 660 words, the summary contains 224 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
They highlighted the case of Andrea Barrett, who is immunocompromised and was blocked from entering a polling station after refusing to remove her mask for an identification check.
Awful. No one should have to risk their life to vote.
This is what happens when you bring in a daft system and ask people to police it when they’re not trained to do so.
