Electoral Administration Bill

moved Amendment No. 24:"Before Clause 13, insert the following new clause—" ““REGISTRATION: POSTAL VOTING (1)   The provisions in section 13 shall apply in the first instance to those registering for either a postal or proxy vote subject to subsection (2). (2)   Until and unless the electoral registration officer is satisfied that the requirements of section 13 can be met by the electorate, those requirements shall not extend to persons voting in person at the polling station. (3)   An elector may only be added to the register as a postal or proxy voter if he has met the requirements of section 13.”” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, there is probably an overlap between this group of amendments, which is enormous, and the following group. In moving Amendment No. 24, I shall speak to my amendments in the group and see how it goes, as we are in an interesting situation. The amendments are rather mixed, and I do not intend to spend too much time going through them. I think that there has been a mistake with a few of them: Amendments Nos. 34 and 37 appear to duplicate Amendments Nos. 35 and 36, so I shall not move one pair. Due to the consequences of the Government’s position on clause stand part, I am afraid that the thrust behind this group of amendments has disappeared. However, I would like to speak to them to debate the issues that would have been addressed were Clause 13 to survive. There is the welcome addition of Amendment No. 26 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Elder, which is why there is an overlap between the groups. That amendment proposes having personal identifiers on all postal votes; it would be a positive addition to the Bill, but we are not sure that it goes far enough. A few amendments in the group are covered by Amendment No. 26, and I shall not move them. Amendment No. 29 would ensure that the Secretary of State would not have the power to repeal provisions made for personal identifiers. That worry has now disappeared, so we will not be pursuing the amendment. The aims of Amendments Nos. 30, 33 and 88 have been achieved by the noble Lord’s proposals. The rest of the amendments in the group stand. Amendment No. 31 comes back to the discussion that we had in Committee with regard to electors who do not correctly answer the questions put to them at the polling station. Under this proposal, they would be provided with a tendered ballot paper that would allow their vote to be counted only where the result is so close that it is considered a dead heat. Amendment No. 31 would leave out that provision so that, if an elector provided the wrong answer to a date of birth question, for example, they would not be allowed to vote. The amendment was tabled in order to ensure that there was no way that anyone could steal another’s vote, even if it was only a tendered ballot paper. After further consideration, I think that it comes down to the question of whether tendered ballots are correct in principle. It is easy to imagine a situation where the electoral register has registered a date of birth incorrectly, which would result in a voter being disenfranchised were it not for the tendered ballot as a last resort. The question posed by the amendment is ““Do we give people the benefit of the doubt and allow them to use a tendered ballot, even though there is a strong possibility that they may not be the person that they claim to be, or do we crack down completely on fraud and state that it is a civil duty on an individual to ensure that their details are correct on the register?””. I am tempted to err on the side of caution, but that may be tested on hearing the Minister’s response. I apologise for that preamble to the main point of the amendments. Amendment No. 24 would introduce personal identifiers on all postal and proxy votes and come with a proviso. The electoral registration officer would have a duty to consider the effect of personal identifiers on the electorate in subsection (2), which is a position that we are prepared to take if the amendment to which we will come later, on all-out individual registration, is not accepted. Amendments Nos. 35, 36 and 96 would introduce national insurance numbers into the requirements for registration for postal voting, while Amendment No. 28 would include personal identifiers as a requirement for registering to vote in the normal way. Amendment No. 28 is intended to have the same effect as adding in national insurance numbers to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Elder, but we were keen to table as early as possible and decided not to table more amendments at the same time. It is a point about which we on these Benches feel strongly. Noble Lords will recall the discussion in Committee on national insurance numbers. In our meetings since Committee, the Minister has said that it might be worth talking to the Electoral Commission on the matter. Northern Ireland has tried and tested the use of national insurance numbers, and it has been a great success, so I wonder whether the Minister has any further thoughts on potential consultation. We had a long discussion on signatures in Committee. I suggested that they were not robust in and of themselves. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Elder, has seen fit to introduce both signature and date of birth in his amendment. It is important that both of those should be there. However, we still feel that national insurance numbers are used by anyone who claims benefits, student loans and so on and would be a useful addition. I would like to make it clear that using identity cards for registration purposes and using national insurance numbers are different proposals, and I would not advocate the use of the former. National insurance numbers already exist and are in use. Most important, they do not represent biometric data, so they would not be the intrusive information contained on the ID cards. The crucial point is that they are already in circulation for a number of bureaucratic functions and they are entirely unique. I am raising in the amendments the possibility that the use of identifiers in postal votes should ultimately be extended generally by order and that we will be considering further the use of national insurance numbers, but that will possibly come later with the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Elder. I beg to move.