While I can see the obvious issue of some people not necessarily having IDs, I’ve always struggled to understand why opponents of this particular part of the bill don’t see issues with how voter fraud data is gathered, in particular when it comes to impersonations (and other related manifestations of in-person fraud).
If you look on the Electoral Commission website (such as for the [2019 election](https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/our-views-and-research/our-research/electoral-fraud-data/2019-electoral-fraud-data)) they tend to record a brief summary of the circumstances surrounding each instance of fraud. When you see instances of people voting twice, or engaging in impersonation (etc), you will see that the offender being caught was entirely based on the suspicion of polling station staff rather than some other mechanism. Therefore the kind of fraud that voter ID would protect against, is not necessarily being prevented as it currently stands.
Therefore variations of the argument of: “*But how big a problem is electoral fraud in the UK? Negligible, actually. Between 2015 and 2019, there were only 88 allegations of in-person voter fraud…*”, seems to be somewhat unsound.
Imagine introducing an elections bill that doesn’t even fix the democratic disgrace that is FPTP.
Tories, man. Time to modernise, UK.
I assume that there has been a big push in the media to convince Conservative voters that voter fraud is rampant. More than likely social media is being used also.
The upshot is their cult-like voters really believe there is a problem.
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While I can see the obvious issue of some people not necessarily having IDs, I’ve always struggled to understand why opponents of this particular part of the bill don’t see issues with how voter fraud data is gathered, in particular when it comes to impersonations (and other related manifestations of in-person fraud).
If you look on the Electoral Commission website (such as for the [2019 election](https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/our-views-and-research/our-research/electoral-fraud-data/2019-electoral-fraud-data)) they tend to record a brief summary of the circumstances surrounding each instance of fraud. When you see instances of people voting twice, or engaging in impersonation (etc), you will see that the offender being caught was entirely based on the suspicion of polling station staff rather than some other mechanism. Therefore the kind of fraud that voter ID would protect against, is not necessarily being prevented as it currently stands.
Therefore variations of the argument of: “*But how big a problem is electoral fraud in the UK? Negligible, actually. Between 2015 and 2019, there were only 88 allegations of in-person voter fraud…*”, seems to be somewhat unsound.
Imagine introducing an elections bill that doesn’t even fix the democratic disgrace that is FPTP.
Tories, man. Time to modernise, UK.
I assume that there has been a big push in the media to convince Conservative voters that voter fraud is rampant. More than likely social media is being used also.
The upshot is their cult-like voters really believe there is a problem.