Voter ID: eroding public faith in democracy - and wasting public money
Documents released to this newsletter show millions in public money have been spent publicising voter ID. The policy should never have been introduced
It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so serious. Boris Johnson turned away from a polling station yesterday for not having identification.
Veterans minister Johnny Mercer forced to publicly apologise after a former soldier said he was unable to vote using his veteran card as ID.
As Byline Times’ Josiah Mortimer reported, voters across England struggled to exercise their right to vote in local elections because of the new ID requirements.
All of this was completely predictable. The Electoral Commission explicitly advised the Conservative government not to introduce compulsory voter ID - but Johnson did it all the same, while also stripping the watchdog of its independence.
We already knew voters would be turned away: last year the Commission found 14,000-ish people were not given a ballot paper because they could not show an accepted form of ID.
The government’s list of acceptable IDs includes senior travel passes but not student cards - so tell us again that voter ID is about tackling infinitesimal instances of voter fraud and not about disenfranchising younger voters and minorities, who are least likely to vote Tory?
To add financial insult to democratic injury, figures obtained by this newsletter show that the government has spent a small fortune on public awareness campaigns about Voter ID.
Up until June of last year, the Electoral Commission had spent more than £4.5million on advertising to raise awareness of the Voter ID policy and the Voter Authority Certificate - the latter is the government’s option for those who don’t have ID, and which almost nobody has taken up.
The Commission spent more than £3 million on ‘offline’ adverts, and a further £1.5 million online in the year to June.
The true figure for spending on Voter IDs advertising is likely to be far higher than £5 million.
The cost of offline adverts as well as ads on Twitter, Google and elsewhere is likely to run into millions.
Data from Meta’s ad library shows the Electoral Commission spent more than £410,000 on Facebook ads in the last 90 days alone.
Think of all the things this money could be better spent on.
And what has the government got for their voter ID policy and all the cash splurged on it?
Results so far suggest that forcing people to have identification to vote has done little to stem the Conservative losses. But it will doubtless further erode already rock bottom public trust in our political system.
That’s the real story of Boris Johnson and voter ID.