Electoral Administration Bill

That is an issue that we shall come to later. We must be careful not to confuse the overriding need to preserve the integrity of the electoral system with the important but nevertheless secondary issue of increasing voter turnout. The registration process should provide an accurate, comprehensive and secure foundation for the conduct of elections. Registration is the building block on which all else rests. Without a credible system, talk of increasing voter turnout would only be counter-productive. We believe that British citizens should want to vote and should be proud of our democratic system. We also believe that steps need to be taken to facilitate that by making voting more secure and more accessible, but we do not believe in focusing on making it so easy to vote that people will vote just because it is easy to do so, rather than out of genuine democratic interest. For these reasons, I want to focus on what needs to be done to ensure confidence in the integrity of our system. Preventing offences is clearly a more effective way to build public confidence than prosecuting offenders.