Electoral Administration Bill

There is more to democracy than casting a vote, but there is no higher democratic duty for those of us who are charged with office than to ensure that voting is safe and simple for everyone who is entitled to participate. That is what the Bill sets out to achieve. It takes forward the Government’s aims of making registration more accessible for voters, enhancing the security of our electoral system and improving the vital, though often technical, process of electoral administration. As the Minister of State, Department for Constitutional Affairs, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), made clear in her opening remarks, the vast majority of the proposals in the Bill have emerged from the recommendations of the independent Electoral Commission, following extensive nationwide consultation. The measures that are outlined are based on three interlocking principles: access to voting for all who are entitled, participation by all who wish to participate and fairness for all through zero tolerance of fraud and intimidation. None of those principles is optional. Through the Bill, we will improve the registration process, in particular by enabling people to register after an election has been called and establishing a new duty for registration officers to take all necessary steps to ensure that comprehensive registers are in place. To tighten security, especially for postal voters, two new electoral fraud offences are to be created, and we are piloting the collection of personal identifiers at registration. To improve the accuracy and integrity of electoral registers and to support national access, we will introduce a framework for CORE—the co-ordinated online record of electors. We will introduce new measures to simplify administration, particularly for postal votes, and give new powers and new finance to electoral administrators. To help to open up elections to everyone, we will improve information available to voters in polling stations, providing guidance in languages other than English and Welsh, and in a variety of formats. To that end, it was encouraging to see a great deal of support for most of those measures in all parts of the House. Extraordinary expertise on the issue has been displayed over the past few hours, as has the accumulated experience of thousands of elections fought over what amounts to many hundreds of years. We have seen evidence of detailed thinking and engagement with the issues and the proposals that we have set out. At the start of my summing up, I want to reiterate the point made by my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State in her opening remarks: the Government are genuinely open to considering amendments tabled in Committee that are based on evidence, where they are non-controversial and we can seek consensus in all parts of the House. That is how we have approached the Bill and how we have put these measures before the House today.