The UK Election: 5. How Do You Make Sure Voting Runs Smoothly?

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Hello and welcome to Understand the UK Election, your essential guide to the general election.

I'm Adam Fleming.

My day job is presenting the BBC's daily news podcast, Newscast, but I've been covering elections at the BBC for ages now.

In fact, 2005 was my first one, meaning this is my sixth UK general election as a professional journalist.

I remember my first election as a citizen, though.

It was 2001, and I was in a polling booth next to the son of a serving cabinet minister.

Wonder which party they voted for.

And that's what we're going to look at today, the actual process of delivering, overseeing, supervising the election.

How do we make it happen?

And my guest today is Vijay Rangarajan.

He's chief executive of the Electoral Commission, which amongst other things sets out standards for how elections should be run and ensures that people feel confident in the democratic process.

Vijay, hello.

Good morning.

Is this a busy time to run your organisation or is it all done in advance?

A lot's done in advance, but it's still a really busy time because, first of all, there's a lot of new rules coming in, Elections Act rules, things like voter ID, things like new postal voting rules.

Second, I mean, the date, the Prime Minister sets the date, and then a lot of other things have to change.

There will be about 40,000 polling stations, 30, 40,000 polling stations this time around.

Probably about 160,000 people involved in that in total.

So there's a huge number of people to get mobilised.

This year, it's obviously going to be in school holidays in Northern Ireland and in Scotland.

So we're going to see things like a surge of postal votes.

So can we get prepared for that?

And the public have a lot of questions.

So we do a lot of public information.

Right.

Let's focus on the people that have the most power in this process, the voters, and let's talk about turnout first of all.

Of course, to turn out to vote, you need to be registered to vote.

What do we know about who is registered and who is not?

We know a lot of people are registered, and it only takes five minutes to register.

The deadline is the 18th of June midnight.

So, if you want to register to vote, you can go online and do it.

You can also do it in writing, and you can even turn up at a council office and register to vote.

What do we know about people who are registered?

We've got a pretty good registration rate, but but we think about

somewhere up to about 8 million people could be on the register and aren't.

And we've done some research.

8 million?

8 million people probably not on the register who could be.

The registration rates, they tend to be from certain communities.

So we've seen, for example, some disabled people aren't registered to vote.

We've done a lot of work with various partners to try to get disabled people, make it easier for them both to register and to come and actually vote in person if they want or by postal or proxy vote.

People who are experiencing homelessness, some ethnic minority groups, private sector renters, people who move a lot, sometimes aren't registered to vote.

Interesting, in Wales, they're about to start, there's a bill going through the Senate, and they're going to start automatic registration tests, pilots in four local authorities to see if it's possible to use all the data that local authorities have on you, be it all your local council tax records or everything else, to put people onto the register or help them get on even more easily.

In terms of who's allowed to vote, just give us the basics on what makes you eligible to be a voter.

You need to be over 18.

You need to have one of the forms of voter ID when you turn up to vote.

You need to be a qualifying nationality, which would mean you can be on the register if you're a Commonwealth citizen or an EU national, qualifying EU national, or of course a UK national.

But for a UK general election, most voters are going to be UK nationals.

Living in the UK or living abroad, this is a big change that happened in the Elections Act of 2022.

Brits abroad can now register to vote and can now vote.

Previously, living overseas for more than 15 years meant you lost the right to vote, but a recent law that's now coming into force has scrapped that limit.

Now, the issues for them are it can take some time.

So once you know the candidates and get all the ballot papers printed and posted out to people, it can be quite tight to get it back.

So it's probably safest to go for a proxy vote if you are an overseas elector.

So choose someone you trust and ask them to vote on your behalf.

And on the Brits abroad point, previously there was a sort of cutoff that if you'd been abroad for a certain amount of time, that was it.

You weren't involved in UK elections anymore.

Exactly.

If you've been abroad for more than 15 years, you couldn't then be on the electoral register.

That bar was removed.

Yeah, I decided to get my vote back because I did vote in the period I've lived in France, but then I lost it.

Now I'll be able to register for three years.

So anyone abroad now who can show a link to a constituency back in the UK and somebody in that constituency can sort of attest for you.

you can register to vote.

I remember back in the 2010s and the Cameron era, there being a huge political story about prisoners being given the right to vote because the European Court of Human Rights told the UK that they had to give them that option.

Now the motion before the House today splits about prisoner votes, splits cleanly into two parts.

Firstly, is the what's actually happened?

So if you're actually a prisoner in jail, you don't vote, but if you're out on remand, it's possible you will be able to vote.

So it's quite a small number who are currently out and there's some very complex guidance out to try to explain who can vote.

What is the broad story of turnout in British general elections?

Because I think there's a sort of feeling that in the old days, everyone felt it was their duty and they went out and voted.

And nowadays, it doesn't feel as important.

So I think in 2019, turnout was about 67%.

Okay, we'd love to see it be even higher.

The May 2023 local elections, that's the last one we have really good data for, probably about half that, 30-odd percent turnout.

So much, much lower.

But I think we're expecting quite a significant turnout at this next general election do you have a clear picture about what makes people likely to actually vote i wouldn't say it's a clear picture but we've got some really interesting evidence so we ask people why didn't you vote at a particular election we do big surveys and the things that stop people actually voting are first of all i was too busy too much else gone on my life to vote that day Second, I didn't like any of the parties.

I didn't find the sort of tenor of the debate attracted me to actually go and vote.

And then a few people, but kind of one or three percent who were put off by various parts of the process, like I didn't want to bring an ID and so on.

And so fourth category, people who are just away from their local constituency that day, be it for their family life or work.

Okay, so voter ID was introduced a couple of years ago.

Just explain what the rationale was for telling people that they had to show a form of ID to vote.

And there's quite a range of things you can show.

It's not just a passport or a driving license.

Exactly.

We order to just build trust in the system and say we actually know who is turning up to vote and we can then check you against the register, that was basically the rationale for it all.

There's a very wide range of ID.

You can use a passport or driving license.

There's various travel cards.

You can use a 60 plus Oyster card.

You can use anything which has the pass logo, which is one of the age accreditation schemes.

You can obviously use the military ID card.

So there's quite a range.

We've asked the government to look again at the entire list because we would like to see them really look at what's the broadest range of ID cards of all forms of proof of ID which would let people vote.

Oh yeah, because people say you can use an old person's travel card, but you can't use a young person's travel card.

Exactly.

And we'd like to look again at whether there's all sorts of different kind of cards that would help, particularly the groups who are preferentially not turning up to vote.

So as I said, above people who are unemployed, younger people, we'd like to really help them make it as easy as possible for them to vote.

If you haven't got any of those, you can apply for a voter authority certificate, which is an A4 sheet of paper that will come.

And you need to do that by 5 p.m.

on the 26th of June for this coming general election.

Although people say that actually, even though you've made that process as easy as possible, it's still a hurdle you have to go through.

And actually, if you don't have the form of ID that allows you to go to the polling station, you might not.

be the kind of person that could do that process.

The example I would give is Northern Ireland that's had a voter ID requirement for a long time now.

And there I think almost everyone is very used to it.

It brings along an ID and we see extremely low rates of anyone not being able to vote.

Right.

A few sort of quickfire things that come up every election.

When you go to the polling station and people from the parties are there with clipboards asking you how you voted, are they actually allowed to do that?

They're allowed to greet you and if you want to tell them how you vote, you're welcome to tell them how you vote.

But you're under no obligation to reveal your vote to anyone at all.

And there's actually been a recent change in the law, which is to try to enhance the secrecy of the ballot box, which is really important.

So nobody should be able to go in with you unless you've actively asked them to do so and you're disabled, for example, and you want someone to help you there.

And that is really quite fundamental.

Can you take your child into the polling booth with you?

You can take your child into the polling booth with you, yes.

And you obviously have seen there is a very famous Twitter stream or X stream now on dogs at polling stations where people shouldn't be taking their dogs into the polling stations, but they sit forlornly and sometimes happily happily outside.

Why can you not take your dog in?

I think it's just a matter of trying to control the polling stations.

We've got people who might be afraid of dogs and so on.

You can take them around, keep them outside, and then hopefully there will be no queue, but you can join and vote as swiftly as possible.

Can you take selfies in the polling booth?

You should not take a selfie in the polling booth.

Subject of lots of conspiracies on social media around this time.

Why do we use pencils and not pans?

They're cheap.

It works well.

People can just put a little cross on and they don't run out.

People have worried about this.

We've never found any real evidence of anything going on with pencils.

Good.

What if you make a mistake?

Can you ask for another ballot paper?

You can take the ballot paper back, destroy it, and ask the returning officer for another ballot paper.

Quite often you see on social media blind people saying, I have to tell somebody who I'm voting for that's anti-democratic.

What's the answer to that?

There are several ways that they can help.

We've done a lot of work with RNIB and actually a lot of other partners to help.

So you could obviously do it at home if you wanted to and do it by a postal vote.

You can obviously go into the polling station and there are various devices again that we've recommended all polling stations should have which will help you actually scan the ballot paper and you can use any form of assistive technology that you like and you can ask anyone in the polling station like the presiding officer themselves to come and help you actually vote.

We've got new guidance out to returning officers how they should help anyone with any form of disability.

So they should have, for example, audio mechanisms for helping somebody.

They should have tactile tactile devices if someone has difficulty holding a pencil.

They should have really large print ballot papers to help someone fill it out.

And it should be accessible.

So we're trying to increase the amount of accessibility for anyone with any form of disability at this election.

How often do people spoil their ballot?

Not very often in the UK.

I think it's more common in the kinds of voting systems where you've got compulsory voting, where the way you show that you don't want to be there is you spoil the ballot.

Occasionally people do spoil the ballot in the UK.

And what we have seen is, particularly where you've got multiple different voting systems systems going on, people spoil the ballot and don't really want to, but it's because they've put like two ones or two X's and it's not quite in the right place on the STV ballot, or they put more than one vote on a first-past-the-boast ballot because they're used to a different or thinking about a different system at the time.

Oh, so actually, we should think of a spoilt ballot as just one where something has gone wrong with a piece of paper, because I think I assume a spoilt ballot, somebody's actively spoilt it for whatever purpose.

The intent of signaling your vote is what matters under the electoral law.

So there's a famous example where someone's taken a ballot paper and written an extremely rude word by every single one of the candidates except one where he'd put not that and that was taken as a valid vote.

Oh, okay.

That surprised me.

Do you think that there is a case for electronic voting?

I mean, I know it's not your job to have a position on this, but are there arguments in favor of it that you can see?

There are definite arguments in favour.

I think there's something really important about separating out the different parts of the process.

So for example, we do electronic counting at the moment in some areas for voting systems like the single transferable vote.

That can really speed up the vote.

I think we would always want really for the trust of voters to continue people being able to mark a clear paper copy because it also helps if there's ever any questions, you can come back and recount it.

You have an emergency on the day of the election as an individual voter.

Oh, I'm going to have to sort out a proxy vote or I can't vote at all.

What's the last minute thing?

You go straight to your returning officer, you phone them up and you say, can I have an emergency proxy vote?

And that is possible.

And they will try and sort you out as well as they can with an emergency proxy.

Someone else who you know and trust can go in and vote on your behalf.

I'm recording my podcast newscast.

I finish late.

I get to the polling station at 9.59 p.m.

Am I going to be okay?

If you're in that queue by 9.59, by 10 p.m., you should then be able to actually get in and fulfill your heart's desire and vote.

Okay, Vijay, thank you very much.

Thank you very much indeed.

And that's all for this episode.

Next time, we're looking at the importance of marginal marginal seats, where it only takes a tiny percentage of people voting a specific way to make the seat change hands.

A crucial part of British electoral geography.

And you can find more episodes on BBC Sounds.

Just search understand the UK election.

And if you want to keep up with the day-to-day blow-by-blow news from the campaign, then you can listen to my other podcast, Newscast.

See you again soon.

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