My Lords, as always, the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has presented the amendment with enormous clarity and great conviction. As chair of the Constitution Committee, I can say that we have been working on this question for some time. We held a stand-alone inquiry on it in the autumn of 2011 and published our first report in January 2012. The most interesting thing about the difference between the report that we issued then and our subsequent scrutiny report on the Bill that is before your Lordships’ Committee this evening is that the Electoral Commission changed its mind between the two reports. That is significant. It looked at the evidence that we had taken and engaged in extensive correspondence and “offline” discussion with us and came back in October with the report from which the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has quoted extensively. I think that it was convinced by the arguments that we made—I am sure that it was by others, too, and took other evidence—and, at the same time, the Government, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has said, have continued to advance the same arguments. We heard those arguments last Wednesday when Chloe Smith represented the Government at a meeting of the Constitution Committee and put forward precisely the arguments which the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has described.
It seems obvious that the fundamental right to vote is the question on which we should focus, and that the law in relation to this matter focuses almost exclusively on the rights and responsibilities of the statutory role of a returning officer and not on the right to vote. If one looks at it from the perspective of the voter, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, again has said, we can be talking about small numbers, but it is worth remembering that the Electoral Commission reckons that around 1,200 people were affected in 2010 by the law as it stands and the individual is very important in this respect. I would just add—not that it is significant in terms of statistical comparisons, but it is still relevant—that, in 47 constituencies in the 2010 election, fewer than 1,200 votes formed the majority, and in 28 constituencies, fewer than 600 votes formed the majority. In a sense, this can be significant, and if one puts value on the individual vote, as I certainly do, then the human right to vote is clearly very important.
The argument which was very current before our discussions with the Electoral Commission last year was that the law as it stood was secure. The Constitution Committee challenged this because when we looked at the two cases that were being relied on at that stage—one from 1901 and one from 2001, almost exactly 100 years later—it was very clear that these depended on the impact and role of the returning officers and not on the individual voter. We think that the time has come to achieve clarity about the rights and responsibilities of the individual voter, which could be done by this simple amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has already referred to the example of Scotland. I would refer also to the example of the United States, where in the presidential elections last November there were certain polling areas where queues were in place two hours after the official closing of the poll and yet the votes were still counted. This is something that we need to look at very swiftly and in time for the 2015 election.