Exactly as everybody warned.
this was always the plan, since minorities and disabled citizens in the UK tend not to vote conservative.
Meanwhile Labour plan to give people with Settled Status the vote, who they probably expect to vote for them. This cherry picking of the electorate isn’t going to benefit anyone.
Yes, disenfranchising people is exactly the same as enfranchising people, your big centrist brain has it all figured out
Well, no. By changing the voter base you’re just avoiding actual productive competition. Why should a party bother doing actual work for its voters to earn their votes , when they can just parachute in a ton of people that will vote for them no matter what?
Oh no, my democracy is going to represent the people rather than an arbitrary subset of the people that happen to align with my biases! The horror!
Democracies should have strong, broad participation. Why would you want a democracy that hears the voice of fewer of its constituents, other than to do things they would never accept given the choice?
You think any change to the voter base is negative for some reason - it’s not. Some changes make the democracy less representative of the people living in it (e.g., arbitrarily deciding some people shouldn’t be able to vote) while some make the democracy more representative (e.g., removing arbitrary barriers to voting).
Oh no, my democracy is going to represent the people rather than an arbitrary subset of the people
Fair point
It just surprised me a bit that Labour have come up with this now, after Brexit, so I’m trying to read between the lines and see what motives they might have to do it. As much as I support Labour and broadening the voter base, I fear the ulterior motive here is to defend themselves from competition. If they actually wanted productive, democratic competition, they would adopt PR.
happen to align with my biases!
Please don’t assume my biases. It’s not a good look.
Brexit supporters claimed brexit would open the nation to more wide skilled immigration rather then be a racist attempt to stop it.
So of course that wanted immigration will lead to a community that needs a say in how the nation is run.
Why shouldn’t they be able to vote?
They live here. They work here. They pay taxes. They’re allowed to stay indefinitely. They’ve made this country their home.
Because we’re browner
The EU ones (does Settled Status even apply to anyone else?) aren’t even that.
If you spent any second around tories you’d quickly learn that English white is the best white they just don’t say it out loud
What I noticed around the referendum was that a lot of Brits seem to think Romanians are all gypsies, confusing them with the Romani.
If they’d bothered to speak to any Romanians, they’d have discovered they have quite a bit in common, as the Romanians seem to hate the Romani even more than we do…
Also affected the poorest communities. The health, wealth and representation gaps grew even wider that day.
Yeah that was the plan
Works as intended then.
Colour me shocked
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Controversial rules governing voter identification led to racial and disability discrimination at this year’s local elections in England, according to a damning report co-written by one of the former ministers responsible for introducing them.
MPs and peers on the all-party parliamentary group on democracy and the constitution will publish a report on Monday saying that the rules caused more harm than they prevented when they came into force in May, and will call for changes, including the acceptance of a greater range of ID documents.
The report was co-authored by Sir Robert Buckland, who was justice minister in 2021 when the bill to introduce the rules was first launched in parliament, and who subsequently helped vote them through.
The report says: “Their decision in that instance was … clearly discriminatory (and potentially unlawful) because they denied Andrea Barratt the right to cast a ballot purely on the basis of circumstances which arose as a direct result of a disability.”
An interim study published by the Electoral Commission earlier this year found at least 14,000 people had been denied a vote because they lacked the correct form of ID.
The report’s authors call for ministers to broaden the types of documents that can be accepted as identification, and to allow those who fail ID checks to sign a legally binding declaration instead confirming their identity.
The original article contains 660 words, the summary contains 224 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The authors found that “polling clerks are more likely to fail to compare a photo ID to the person presenting that document if the person is of a different ethnicity”.
They also highlighted the case of Andrea Barratt, who is immunocompromised and was blocked from entering a polling booth after refusing to remove her mask for an identification check.
WTF am I even reading? The problem is that some clerks are too stupid to identify non-white persons? And that someone else refused to take off the mask for 2 seconds to show her face!!?
At least it’s not the usual racist bullshit from the US where non-white people are allegedly too stupid and/or poor to get an ID…
Immunocomprimised may potentially be a big risk landing someone in hospital if they inhaled something from the atmosphere that a weakened Immune system could handle
Sometimes that risk could end up being fatal
Fyi not a doctor but most people excluding anti-vaxers know how immune systems work
If you are that endagered that you can’t take it off for a few seconds, you would also not be casually walking around with a normal mask… They are not a 100% protection.
Really shouldn’t have to take the risk to stick a cross next to your favourite Oxford University graduate’s figurehead
People also don’t want to end up in hospital feeling horrible as well
Immunocomprimised people have died because of covid and the anti vax idiots increased the amount of times that happened
Mail in ballots?
more likely to fail to compare a photo ID to the person presenting that document if the person is of a different ethnicity
Wait, are they saying if someone is a different ethnicity they are more likely to not check if the ID matches?
That’s how it reads to me but I don’t think it’s the intention?
I think it means they’re less likely to be able to identify that the ID photo is the same person as the one standing in front of them. It’s the other-race effect, which I understand is quite natural for people of all races that have less experience with other races.
Yeah, that’s what I assumed it was supposed to mean, but it really doesn’t read that way to me.
It’s kinda funny how this is the opposite problem of the usual “they all look the same!”
I would probably unable to vote in the UK, given that I am not white and have IDs with various stages of hairlength and glasses. I look quite different in every photo.
Btw. this doesn’t seem to be much of an issue in Germany, so this looks more like growing pains with people who are not used to IDs.
… and will call for changes, including the acceptance of a greater range of ID documents.
They’re just a bunch of fucking dullards aren’t they?!?! REPEAL IT!
The UK has driver’s license so why not voter ID?
Because depriving requires a qualification, voting dose not,
Voting requires you to be legally allowed to vote. This just makes it easier to verify who can and cannot vote.
Yet all the evidence indicates 2 things.
One it is not needed. As voter fraud is so low as to be insignificant.
Two it actually limits peoples ability to vote.
Where I live we get medical services cards with photos on them, free and no qualification needed, everyone eligible to vote should have or be able to get one
We don’t. The new law requires local auth to issue photo ID. But dose not provide a standard way for people to confirm they are the person photographed.
In genral its a mess. And leave the people least able to spare 9-5 time to run back and forth to council offices etc screwed.
IE the poor who work long hours. Or disabled
And less votes for their guy, which is the actual problem. Saying minorities can’t get an ID is pure racism. But it’s fine when they do it.
But surely you can’t just let people vote without identifying them?
I mean, for a start it’s a solution without a problem. We don’t really have an issue with voter fraud in the UK. All this has done is disenfranchise people who could previously vote without needing an often costly ID.
It’s unnecessary
Yeah, I think voter ID is alright, but when you historically doesn’t have it and don’t really need it, it just seems to be a barrier for barrier’s sake.
Tories lost a lot of votes because old people forgot to bring ID and then didn’t bother going back again. So regardless of whether its free, it still disenfranchises people
It costs time and effort, something that disabled people often have less of.
Voter fraud is extremely low in the UK, and most of what does occur isn’t stopped by these changes (the most common type is, for example, parents submitting a postal vote on behalf of their (18+) children without asking them), So here’s a question for you:
If the number of people disuaded from voting due to the new ID laws significantly outnumber* the amount of fraud that’s prevented by this law, was the law a positive change?
*To the point that it has a larger effect on election outcome
We’ve had voter I.D. here in Northern Ireland for ages and I haven’t heard any complaints
You give your name & address at your local polling place, and it is checked off by a polling officer against the Electoral Roll. So yes, you could pretend to be someone else, but they would need to have not already voted. And you could only do it once per polling station, because you’ll be recognised by the polling officers. And for what?
Name + DOB + address
All you need them to give you for verification.
I can only speak for the US, and even then, only for my state of Illinois, but I had to provide my ID and proof of residency when I registered to vote. After that just my name, address, and signature were needed during the actual election.
In Kansas and it was like that when I started voting, then they introduced the ID requirement at some later point. Voter fraud was never an issue, but it did penalize minorities just like gerrymandering so it did what it set out to do.
Republicans couldn’t be happy with a majority, they want absolute control.
I don’t understand what the problem is. A lot of countries require an ID to vote, that’s normal practice. Why is British public such snowflakes about it?
I don’t understand what the problem is.
The fact that “Voter ID in England led to racial and disability discrimination”.
Maybe read the article?
He doesn’t consider that to be a problem.
Is it hard to get an ID/passport in the UK or are their disabled people just even more disabled than in the rest of the world? Maybe the problem here is infrastructure (or lack thereof). You could be the most disabled person in Sweden and your caretaker would still take you to the tax agency or police to get identification of some sort. Not having any way to identify yourself is pretty much unheard of here except for the severely mentally ill who refuse help.
Passports are expensive & disabled people are poor. And no, there’s not much help for disabled people in Tory Britain. Also it’s a bit of a Catch-22, it’s hard to get ID that proves who you are without ID that proves who you are. Currently having that problem with a disabled family member and haven’t found a solution yet.
What discrimination? Every citizen should have a passport. That’s how it works in every developed country!
If passports were given out for free then sure, but they’re really fucking expensive. Mine expired years ago, but since I can’t afford to travel anyway I’m hardly going to scrape together the £80+ for a new one.
Yeah, Britain is very weird. How do you even live without a passport? No wonder Britain has plenty of identity theft going on…
It’s explained in the article. So I will say it again: “Maybe read the article?”
Not every citizen has a passport. And they usually aren’t free either.
Yeah, why? How’s this even possible? Or legal?
Read the article you walnut.
I don’t give a shit about the article. Why is it possible to live in a country without a passport? That doesn’t make any fucking sense!
Why would you need a passport if you aren’t leaving the country?
It’s a piece of paper you buy every ten years if you want to travel across national borders, it’s not like some intrinsic part of your being.
Because you don’t need a passport? It’s not something everyone needs or has.
It’s unnecessary
Name + DOB + address
How is that secure though? I could easily figure out that information for people of my gender and in my age range…
So what do you do? Do you turn up and give the details for Double_A, vote, then turn around and pretend that you’re now me, for example?
Or do you spend the day travelling around to different polling booths hoping that the person you’ve chosen from that area hasn’t voted yet, or that they nobody will make a fuss when it turns out they’re trying to vote twice?
Yes that, but very early so the chance is high that I vote before the real guy.
So in your scenario, what happens if the person has already voted, or cast a postal vote? Or what happens when they turn up later? Do you think that they’re just dismissed, or do you think that someone’s going to investigate the fraud?
You clearly haven’t thought this through.
When they prove they are the real guy you get busted for voter fraud. Congratulations.
And then you commit voter fraud and get the appropriate punishment.
Oh, and what about your own vote? Gonna vote twice? Might not want to do that…
You get a bus full of old people, tour them around the city and tell them ID data to cast votes. Works like a charm for Putin. Voting without a passport is absurd.
It works for Putin because anyone who disobeys him mysteriously falls out of a window.
Again, in this scenario, what happens when the actual voter turns up? You conveniently ignored that part of my post.
Most people don’t vote, that’s not a very realistic scenario.
Most people don’t vote
About 70% of the electorate vote nowadays, it has varied higher or lower but never been as low as 50% of eligible voters to even say “half of eligible people don’t vote” let alone “most”
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8060/CBP-8060.pdf
So assuming you have say 20 old people on your fictional bus, even assuming that all of your voter info is correct and everyone is on the register, the chances of all of them being able to cast a second vote without any of them being caught are billions to one.
The idea that millions of people will risk a significant chance of a lengthy prison sentence for their individually tiny extra votes is absurd when any actual attack on election integrity would not happen at the point of “turning up at the polling station and hoping for the best.”
Even if one in a million voters did try and get away with this - which again is a hugely inflated number from anything we get an indication of - if to do so you stop tens of thousands of people from being able to vote at all that still makes the election less democratic overall.
But you think buses full of old people voting in multiple polling stations is?
And yet, nobody was doing that and the system was working.
It isn’t, but that actually isn’t really a problem. The information required to pose and steal a single voter’s vote is pretty easy to come by. But it’s an absolutely terrible way to steal an election, simply because it doesn’t scale well.
While it is relatively simple and probably a low enough risk to steal a single vote, realistically to flip enough votes to guarantee a desired result you would need to do this several hundred or possibly even thousands of times. There are only so many disguises you can use or polling stations you can go to within an election constituency before you get caught. Also, there’s the time constraint involved. You need to do all this in the span of 12-18 hours on a single day. An individual cannot manage this by themselves.
So now you need to scale up your operation, so you enlist a whole bunch of people to split the vote stealing with. Now you have a conspiracy which is a huge risk to discovery, and also likely carries a more harsh punishment should you be discovered. Nobody is going to steal an election this way.
It is much easier to steal an election by targeting a later step of the process, either by compromising the integrity of the ballot boxes via corrupting election officials, or in areas where electronic voting takes place (not the UK) manipulating the tabulation of the votes somehow. In countries where democracy is valued, these steps of the process are hardened quite significantly, with multiple safeguards to prevent tampering.
@Double_A @PunnyName Firstly, we don’t do that.
Secondly we vote where our neighbours are.
Thirdly a double vote has a high chance of being noticed.
Fourthly, there are few polls where ond vote would make a difference. The ones where it would/have get even more interest in advance and afterward.
I’ve had voter ID for as long as I know, and I’ve been with my parents to vote very often (good educating on their part).
It’s never been an issue, you bring your ID, your voter ticket (which gets sent to you by the govt) and cast a vote. No racism issues there.
It seems the UK has somehow fucked it up.
That would be the tories for you, yes
And yet, it would be even less of “never been an issue” to have it in the first place. Shocking!
I think the biggest issue is simply that there was no need to change the system if there was no problem to begin with. Any changes to the system would lead to some people losing their ability to vote for no good reason.
If they stick with the law for a few decades no one will care anymore because everyone is used to it. But this year 14,000 people lost the ability to vote and they prevented about 0.4 people from commiting voter fraud. That’s not very proportional.
Why would anyone lose their vote? Everyone should have a passport.
Why?
It’s because the political party who get the most votes from old people made it so that an OAP bus pass was an acceptable form of identification, whereas student, IDs and other young people, IDs were not accepted
Why not just have a passport like all normal people?
Not everyone has a passport or the money to buy one simply to vote.
Not a problem anywhere else.
It even exists in Northern Ireland and has never been an issue. You can get photographic ID here for free for voting (but is also usable for proof of age) so it’s very useful
Exactly! It’s not a problem anywhere in the world but England!
