Photo-identity for voters, racism and the Electoral Commission

Forcing people to show photographic identity before they could vote in May's local elections led to racial and disability discrimination. That's the conclusion of a report published today by the all-party parliamentary group on democracy and the constitution.

I can't find the report online, but the Guardian says:

The report, which has been seen by the Guardian, says: “The current voter-ID system is, as it stands, a ‘poisoned cure’ in that it disenfranchises more electors than it protects.”

The authors found that “polling clerks are more likely to fail to compare a photo ID to the person presenting that document if the person is of a different ethnicity”.

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.

The report says: “Their decision in that instance was … clearly discriminatory (and potentially unlawful) because they denied Andrea Barrett the right to cast a ballot purely on the basis of circumstances which arose as a direct result of a disability.”

The point that demanding photo ID from voters disenfranchises more electors than it protects will not be a surprise to anyone who has followed the debate on the issue.

James Meek wrote in the London Review of Books at the time of the local elections:

A 2014 report by the Electoral Commission arguing in favour of voter ID – which the organisation continues to back – conceded that ‘there is no evidence to suggest that there have been widespread, systematic attempts to undermine or interfere with recent elections through electoral fraud.’

But he said much more about what turns out to have been a worrying document:

The 2014 Electoral Commission report, signed off on by its then chair, Jenny Watson, is written in an odd key. Rather than enumerating, in bureaucratic, quantitative terms, the scale of the danger that voter ID is supposed to head off, it deals in hearsay and rumour. 

It names sixteen English electoral fraud hotspots, but doesn’t say, as at least one newspaper (the Times) reported it did, that these are places where electoral fraud has been shown to take place. It says they’re places where people are more likely to say they think it’s happening – where, in the report’s words, there appears to be ‘a greater risk of cases of alleged fraud being reported’.

Who are the people who suspect foul play, and whom do they suspect, and why? The commission hasn’t made public the identities or comments of its respondents in these sixteen areas – Birmingham, Bradford, Calderdale, Derby, Kirklees, Pendle, Slough, Walsall, Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Coventry, Hyndburn, Oldham, Peterborough, Tower Hamlets and Woking – but the report candidly summarises their presumptions. 

‘We have heard some strongly held views,’ the report states, ‘based in particular on reported first-hand experience by some campaigners and elected representatives, that electoral fraud is more likely to be committed by or in support of candidates standing for election in areas which are largely or predominately populated by some South Asian communities, specifically those with roots in parts of Pakistan or Bangladesh.’

The Electoral Commission isn't racist, you understand, but it believes we have to humour voters who are by changing the law to put a burden on all of us and deny some people their votes.

I tried to download the report from the commission website, but was met with notices saying 'The requested page could not be found' and 'We have been the subject of a complex cyber-attack. Find out about the data affected, the potential impact, and the measures we’ve taken.'

In view of the sensitivity of some of the date the commission holds, it's worrying to come across this story on BBC News:

The Electoral Commission has confirmed it failed a basic cyber-security test around the same time hackers gained entry to the organisation.

A whistleblower told the BBC that the Commission was given an automatic fail during a Cyber Essentials audit.

Last month the Commission revealed that "hostile actors" accessed its emails and potentially the data of 40 million voters.

A spokeswoman said the Commission had still not passed the basic test.

This makes me wonder whether it wouldn't be safer to allow councils to look after their own electoral data.

And, though the idea of a body independent of government to supervise elections is appealing, the Electoral Commission does not come across as being that body.