Alexander Bowen: Forget votes at 16 – automatic voter registration is the real issue to fight against

Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.

 Now this is not an objection to automatic voting registration per se, in a proportional electoral system AVR is perfectly reasonable.

Despite what everyone seems to believe, and the banshee screeching during the UK’s voter ID debates, changes to electoral law generally have very little impact on the number of people actually voting and only a negligible impact on the composition of who is voting.

Election day registration, that is being able to register then immediately vote on election day, which whilst slightly different from automatic voter registration is nonetheless considered the gold standard for accessible voting, has had no measurable impact when properly controlled for other variables.

The same is true of voter ID – the electoral reform society might insist there are “chilling effects” and that it disenfranchises millions of voters yet the evidence they point to ends up being some banal extrapolation from an irrelevant council election in a trial run nearly a decade ago.

The decent country-wide decade-long evidence from natural experiments not labs, finds that for all the yapping about “Republican style voter suppression” ID requirements had no negative impact on registration or turnout and if anything boosted the turnout of non-white groups the Republicans were allegedly trying to stop voting.

There’s no reason to believe it would be dissimilar in the UK.

Automatic voter registration normally then is basically a non-issue; it just mildly reduces frictions and has very little impact – the issue if anything in these ‘normal systems’ is administration.

California’s implementation was atrocious with hundreds and thousands of errors that massively overloaded their equivalent of the DVLA (that was handling many of the registrations). Obviously elsewhere, like in Sweden, it’s not a mess, but when I think about UK state capacity and its ability to implement policy, it seems quite obvious that in a choice between looking like a functioning Swedish government or a Californian hot-mess it will almost by default opt for hot-mess.

If then it will have no impact, and the only drawback noted is an embarrassing implementation, what is my objection to it. Two words – constituency boundaries.

In a proportional system, even one with constituencies, national levelling seats ultimately mean that constituency boundaries don’t really matter. If a seat in Bavaria has 35 percent more voters than a seat in Saxony it isn’t relevant – the Saxon AfD votes are not worth 35% more than the Bavarian CSU votes. In the non-proportional USA it doesn’t really matter either – state apportionment based on general population places an upper limit on how off anywhere can ultimately be. The presence of statewide contests for many of the races that matter, helps too. The UK though is different – boundaries are determined by registered voters.

The current system of determining boundaries by registered voters is already structurally and seemingly permanently biased in Labour’s favour – for they represent overwhelmingly the constituencies with the lowest turnout. Indeed, out of the bottom 20 constituencies for turnout, all of them are held by Labour or Lindsey Hoyle (aka the ex-Labour Speaker) whilst 18 of the top 20 are, or were until the Liberal Democrat surge, Tory seats.

I happen to agree with organisations like Make Votes Matter that think it’s silly that 29,033 voters in Labour-held Manchester Rusholme get the same level of representation as 54,336 in Harpenden and Berkhamsted, but what I find deeply tiring is seeing the same organisations and academics who spend every waking minute talking about proportional representation and making votes matter, now come out and endorse a proposal that will lead to even more disproportionate representation.

By auto-registering anyone eligible to vote, something like 8 million people will be added, the large majority of those added on net will never actually vote but will nonetheless contribute to giving the areas they live more representation. The areas they live being disproportionately Labour seats. It’s fully possible then to imagine a scenario where some LibDem-Tory marginal seat sees twice as many votes cast as a safe Labour seat whilst both having only one MP.

What this amounts to then is a permanent shift of electoral power away from British people and away from people who actually vote. And I say here ‘away from British people’ given the eligible population does not mean British citizens but thanks to the horror that is the Representation of the People Act 1983 anyone from a third of the world who lives in Britain regardless of duration. For many academics and NGOs, automatic voter registrations greatest benefit is in getting those people registered.

Take students.

If universities are used to auto-register their students as voters, a practice that is quite common in ARV parts of Europe, then you get two effects. The first comes from drawing seats based on registered voter numbers whilst having differential practical turnout – it means more representatives for people in student heavy areas (their professors for example) regardless of whether the students actually ever vote. There’s a clear structural bias in that regard, more seats for left-wing urban areas. Fine, whatever.

The second effect though is far more sinister and comes from the aforementioned absence of a citizen based franchise. That effect looks like any international student, so long as they come from the Commonwealth, getting straight off the plane, arriving at their student accommodation, and being added automatically to the voter rolls. No connection to the country, no familiarity with its politics, yet entitled and registered to vote. Just from international students it means 350,000 foreigners registered to vote each year automatically.

Add in other places where automatic registration typically takes place – e.g. a country’s tax office – and any Commonwealth citizen who works in the UK legally will be registered.

Systematically rigging seat allocations in Labour’s favour is not good for democracy, but making it so transient foreigners can automatically vote is even worse. It means more campaigns fought on issues of no relevance to the UK like building an airport in Kashmir, it means more campaigns fought on sectarian ethnic grounds, and it means single-issue immigration based clientelism (promises of extending visas to win votes).

The Conservatives need to do two things then.

Firstly don’t get distracted by votes at 16. It’s a red herring that won’t notably impact election results. 16 and 17 year olds are ultimately only equivalent to about 2 per cent of the electorate, and don’t overwhelmingly favour a single party. They won’t even particularly impact constituency boundaries given 16 and 17 year olds are fairly evenly distributed around the country.

The second bit though is to fight – and it is to fight automatic voter registration, at least for now.

Be clear that it means more disproportionate election results in Labour’s favour, and be clear too that it means turbocharging the representation of an arbitrary selection of foreigners in Labour’s favour. A Tory MP feeling cheeky could even label it the post-2016 academic phrase du jour – democratic backsliding.

As for Katie Lam and Robert Jenrick, if you are reading this, you two are the key to making this terrible policy a little less awful. Campaign on stopping the automatic registration of foreigners to vote, and campaign on ending their automatic right to vote. You are doing a good job but this is a genuinely structural issue, and it is one that will have an impact that outstrips fare dodging 100-1.

A short six page bill amending the 1983 Representation of the People Act’s entitlements is all that’s needed.

Just do it before Labour’s electorate gerrymandering makes it too hard to undo.

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