Students urged to register to vote after electoral registration shake up

Changes to the electoral registration system so that voters will now have to register individually is thought to decrease the number of voters most drastically in areas that have a large population of students.

University town, Canterbury has seen the largest drop in voters—numbers are expected to have fallen by 13 per cent. Cambridge and Dundee West have also been negatively affected, each with an 11 per cent loss in voter registration.

Previous to the changes, voters could register by household. The government has argued that the change is to improve the accuracy of the list, which will help to avoid fraud and error.

Those opposed to the changes say that the move is too quick, having been brought forward by a year against the advice from the Electoral Commission. Supporters argue that this change has been coming for a while, particularly with the UK being the last Western democracy to use the household registration method.

Far from the 1.9 million missing voters that the Electoral Commission predicted in the run up to the register changes, there is concern over the 1.8 per cent that are missing from last year.

Gloria De Piero, Shadow Minister for Electoral Registration, has been at the forefront of those encouraging students to register, even knocking on doors in her constituency in past weeks.

She says: “The transition to Individual Electoral Registration (IER) has resulted in a significant fall in the number of people on the electoral register in areas with a university,”

“As you will know, IER prevents universities from block registering all their students in halls of residence, but measures should be taken to ensure that it is as easy as possible for individual students to register.”

According to De Piero, some higher education institutions are succeeding at tackling the problem.  She says that: “The University of Sheffield has seen outstanding results by integrating voter registration into the enrolment process … I write to you today to call for official guidance to be issued to every Vice Chancellor in the country about how they can adopt the Sheffield model in their universities for next year’s enrolment.”

As of last year, the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University and Royal Northern College of Music have a total of 50,000 students registered to vote.

A concern in the Greater Manchester area is the high house turnover rate, meaning that 1 in 5 of the population change household each year. High turnovers, such as in this area, make it difficult to contact individuals to remind them of registration.

Changes to electoral registration aren’t the only issue for Labour. New government boundary changes mean that the number of seats will decrease from 650 to 600.

Many have accused the Conservatives of promoting this adjustment to make it harder for Labour to win in the next election. It is currently thought that the opposition “may need bigger swing than in 1997 to win”—around 10 per cent.

Labour fears that the boundary review will potentially favour Conservative-held areas. The party not only need to win seats back from the SNP but also ones they have never won before, including  Basingstoke, Portsmouth South and Canterbury.

Speaking on the topic of electoral registration, a Cabinet Office spokesperson said: “Individual Electoral Registration is an essential measure to tackle electoral fraud. We have worked hard with local authorities for years now to clean up the register—any entries removed will be people who have moved house, died or never existed because they were registered fraudulently,”

“Students often move house every year and this can make it hard for councils to keep accurate registers. That’s why, with the government’s help, councils are working with universities on ways of ensuring the highest possible level of student registration. We fully support the aims of the National Voter Registration Drive this week. Students, like everyone, can now apply to register online in just a few minutes and at any time, day or night.”

De Piero insists that Labour need to use this time to find the voters that the government have lost. “The most important thing we all can do now, all of shadow cabinet, every Labour MP, is go out and hear people about why they did not trust us last time and what we need to change. You can never be having a fight with the electorate, you’ve got to be standing with the electorate.”

She considers this Labour’s “moral duty”. “It’s not their fault, it’s politics’ fault,” she says.