Number of voters turned away under government’s new ID laws will not be fully counted

Minister says it is not government’s job to understand why people leave polling stations without voting

A polling station in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire (Getty/iStockphoto)

The number of people turned away from voting because they don't have the right ID will not be fully recorded, a minister has admitted.

Communities minister Rachel Maclean yesterday confirmed to the Commons that would-be voters turned away by greeters would not be counted in official figures.

The development means the effect of the government's new voter ID policies – which critics have characterised as voter suppression – may never be known.

While people turned away at polling station desks will be recorded, people who are alerted at the door that they will need ID and who then leave will not count, the minister said.

"If someone decides not to exercise the right to vote in a free and democratic society, it’s not for the agent of a local authority to intrusively ask why that person decides not to vote," the minister told MPs.

The government says the new requirements for voter ID will help protect the security of elections, despite in-person voter fraud being almost unheard of at scale in British elections.

May's local elections will be the first in Great Britain where voters will be required to have some form of photographic ID in order to vote.

Speaking in the Commons yesterday Labour MP Nick Smith said voter suppression had "already occurred" because many voters who needed ID still did not have it.

"For this set of elections the Electoral Commission tell me that 250,000 to 350,000 people should have applied for a voter ID certificate," he said.

"As of the deadline just 85,000 were issued despite the estimated £4 million advertising budget.

"Given just the voters requiring voter ID applied for the certificate, does the minister accept that voter suppression has already occurred?"

Ms Maclean said she rejected this conclusion.

"Members opposite are making some kind of shrill and hyperbolic claims about this misguided idea that this is somehow voter suppression," the minister replied.

"I find that quite extraordinary given that his own constituency party requires and expects their members to turn up with photographic ID to select members in their own elections."

She also said argued that it was not ministers' responsibility to encourage people to vote or understand why they did not.

“Sometimes people just don’t want to vote. We live in a free country,” she said.

Ms Maclean said there would be “a full evaluation of the policy, of which formal data collection in the polling station is only one part”.