Calls in Gloucestershire to scrap plans for Voter ID
Gloucestershire Councillors are set to discuss plans for Voter ID.
Calls for the Government to scrap plans to introduce voter ID in the UK will be discussed in Gloucestershire.
Liberal Democrat County Councillors are calling for the Government to scrap proposed legislation that could disenfranchise millions of voters.
They are calling on fellow councillors to join with them in opposing the Government’s Electoral Integrity Bill.
Councillors Paul Hodgkinson and Ben Evans will be presenting the motion at the council meeting on June 30 which also asks for the county council to investigate ways of increasing turnout in the county.
The Electoral Integrity Bill would introduce a requirement for photo ID to be produced at all polling stations in the future.
However, research by the Cabinet Office, released in March, has shown that nearly 10 per cent of the public don’t have the necessary photo ID.
The Liberal Democrats say this equates to nearly 50,000 eligible voters in Gloucestershire.
Pilots held in 2019 also saw hundreds of people turned away from the polling station and disenfranchised.
Liberal Democrat group leader Paul Hodgkinson said: “The Government’s proposals are a solution to a problem that simply doesn’t exist. In 2019 there was a grand total of just one conviction for impersonating someone at the polling station, out of the 47.5 million people who voted in the general election.
“The real purpose of the proposals is to make it harder to vote for those groups who typically don’t support the Conservatives – including younger voters and those from ethnic minorities
“Instead of disenfranchising the public, this Government should be reaching out to the public to encourage voters to engage in local politics
Councillor Ben Evans said: “Let’s not pretend this is an innocent attempt to prevent voting fraud – instead this is a move straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook; citing a non-existent fraud to disenfranchise millions of voters.
“We can only hope that some of our council colleagues have the same courage as those Conservative MPs who have spoken out against these dangerously illiberal proposals.”
The Conservative group declined to comment about the motion.
The Government says there is an inexcusable potential for someone to cast another’s vote at the polling station in the current electoral system.
They say voter fraud is a crime they cannot allow room for and that people of all walks of life already show identification to prove who they are on a daily basis.