LETTER FROM LONDON
May 4th is local election day in the UK. The British are invited to renew around 8,000 municipal or regional councilors and to elect a few mayors.
Small revolution this year: to have the right to slip their ballot into the ballot box, voters will have to bring proof of identity: a passport, a driving license, the senior reduction card in London transport can do the case (but not the student cards). Those who do not have any of these documents could, until the end of April, apply to the government for a certificate (a “Voting Authority Certificate”), free of charge, on which their name and a passport-type photograph appear.
Astonishing as it may seem, with the exception of Northern Irish people who have been asked for proof of identity before the voting booth since the early 2000s, until now the British did not need any document to going to vote, even at the most important polls – the parliamentary elections at Westminster. All they had to do was go to the polling station assigned to them, after having received a summons a few weeks earlier by mail, and confirm their address to the assessors, who had electoral registers.
For years, fraud specialists have pointed out the weaknesses of an identification system based on trust, but which they believe has become far too light, whereas with the advent of more artificial intelligence tools more powerful, the risks of disinformation and manipulation of elections increase considerably. Certainly the only notable example of voter fraud dates back to the 2014 local election in Tower Hamlets. The mayor of this re-elected London borough at the time, Lutfur Rhaman, was convicted in 2015 of fraud and corruption, in particular for having had ballots counted several times in certain polling stations.
“A well-defined weakness”
Following the municipal elections of May 2022, the police investigated 193 suspected cases of fraud but only fined one. However, the Electoral Commission, the independent agency responsible for monitoring the smooth running of the British elections, has repeatedly stressed that the absence of verification of the identity of voters constitutes “a well-defined weakness” of the national electoral system and that it should be corrected. The Conservative government therefore complied and passed the Elections Act 2022, introducing the Voter ID.
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