Peter Geoghegan: UK election laws are broken – but voter ID will solve nothing

But while his dissembling is almost ­axiomatic, often the biggest problems emerge on those rare occasions when the prime minister does keep his word. That’s why we should all be so worried by his promises to “protect democracy” – by which he means gaming the electoral ­system to ensure Tory advantage.

Take Johnson’s commitment to mandatory voter identification. The move – unveiled in his post-pandemic Queen’s speech last week – was greeted with outrage by many across the political spectrum. But the prime minister was just making good on a promise made almost 18 months ago.

Back in December 2019, just days after his “stonking” general election victory, Johnson stood up in the House of Commons promised to a “radical overhaul” of our democratic institutions. A year and a half later, he is pushing ahead with ­arguably his only concrete proposals for electoral change: voter ID.

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Britain’s right is bewitched by the idea that voter fraud is a significant problem. For years Ukip – and some Conservatives – blamed losses on fake ballots and ­impersonations, often with hearsay and conjecture in place of any actual evidence.

Of the 44.4 million ballots cast in the 2017 general election, there were just 28 allegations of someone pretending to be someone else, of which only one resulted in a conviction. In all, there have been just three convictions for personation at polling offices in the past seven years.

Introducing compulsory voter ID matters because it will make it harder for people to vote, particularly those from already disadvantaged backgrounds. In the United States, forcing voters to carry photographic ID has been found to lower turnout among minorities, overwhelmingly to the benefit of the Republican Party. The Cabinet ­Office’s own research suggests that more than 2 ­million UK voters could lack the necessary ID to take part in future elections.

Johnson’s government knows all this. It has been estimated that obliging all ­voters to show photo ID before voting in future elections will cost around £40m in a decade – that’s a lot of money to fight a problem that doesn’t exist, not least when foreign office minister James Cleverly says that Britain’s international aid budget has been slashed because of the post-pandemic “fiscal situation”.

So, what is the government’s justification for voter identification? I got a taste of it last week when I appeared on BBC Radio Scotland alongside a Daily Mail columnist to discuss the move. I had expected a reasonable discussion, instead I was accused of being part of something called “the civil liberties brigade” (Do I get a uniform?). Even when my intemperate interlocutor accepted that there was no empirical basis for the change, he ­defended it on the grounds of precaution.

That’s the Cabinet Office line, too. This week a spokesperson from Michael Gove’s department promised that voter ID will “combat the inexcusable potential for it to take place in our current system”. But why is the government so determined to close up loopholes that aren’t being abused while so many real, existing threats to our democracy are going unchallenged?

Indeed, many of the biggest dangers to our democracy seem to emanate from the Conservative Party itself, and its increasingly active outriders. Ahead of the 2019 general election, the Tories rebranded its Twitter account as a fact-checker, posted fake adverts on Google and circulated doctored news footage. One analysis found that almost 90% of a sample of ­Conservative Facebook adverts posted before the general election contained ­misleading information.

We saw many of the same tricks in ­Scotland earlier this month. In the days running up to the Scottish ­Parliament election, third-party campaigns with no clear details of their funding spent tens of thousands of pounds on digital ads pushing tactical voting. Under new election legislation, digital adverts in Scotland are supposed to carry details of who paid for them – but I discovered that many ­campaigns had not even done this.

For example, a group called Young ­Unionists spent more than £20,000 on Facebook ads, including more than £5000 in the final days of the campaign with no sign of any imprints. The pro-Trump ­student group Turning Point UK spent £3700 on anti-SNP Facebook ads. Again, with no details of who was bankrolling such largesse. (When I asked the Electoral Commission if they would be investigating these apparent breaches of the new laws, they told me they’d “been in touch” with campaigners to remind them of the rules.)

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That’s not the end of it. When I ­unfurled my two-foot-long, peach-coloured list ballot paper earlier this month, my eye was drawn to a logo of a leaf with “Green” in capital letters. This was the “Independent Green Voice”, a recondite party whose five candidates included two former ­British National Party activists and a man accused of Holocaust denial (he denies the allegation).

While far-Right candidates such as ­Britain First leader Jayda Fransen won just 46 votes in Glasgow, Independent Green Voice’s anti-immigrant, anti-EU stance won thousands of votes. The key question is how many of these voters thought they were voting for the Scottish Greens?

These voters mattered. In Glasgow, for example, where Independent Green Voice took 2210 votes, the Green Party fell 914 votes short of a second seat on the regional list. In South of Scotland, the Greens were just 115 votes short of taking a seat. Independent Green Voice won 1690.

The Electoral Commission is well aware of these various shenanigans but is largely powerless to act. The maximum fine for breaking electoral law is a paltry £20,000.

Rather than giving the watchdog new powers, the co-chair of the Conservative Party, Amanda Milling, has said the body should become “more targeted” – or be abolished. For all his bromides about ­restoring trust in politics, Boris Johnson is a man who fronted a Vote Leave campaign that broke the law by over spending during the 2016 Brexit referendum.

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MANY experts believe that there is one electoral reform would be go a long way to improving the quality of British democracy: a more proportional voting system. First-past-the-post tends towards single party dominance – and wasted votes. So, what is the government doing about this? Pressing ahead with plans to switch all elections for metro mayors in England and police and crime commissioners back to FPTP.

Conservatives will be the big beneficiaries from this retrograde move. ­English Tory candidates tend to get fewer transfer votes than their rivals in more ­proportional systems – but often top the polls on first-past-the-post.

But, as Oxford political sociologist ­Stephen Fisher noted recently, the one place where the Tories are not agitating for first-past-the-post is Holyrood. ­“Reverse electoral reform north of the border,” Fisher wrote in Prospect magazine, “would have produced an overwhelming SNP majority this month, and would likely reduce all other parties to a rump for as far as the eye can see.”

Britain’s broken electoral system is likely to be exposed again if, and when, there is another independence referendum. Last year, the Scottish parliament passed an act covering any future referendum that would see fines for ruling breaking raised to £500,000 and increased transparency. But the new regulations would only apply to donations in Scotland.

British democracy is in peril. Dark money and dirty tricks risk fundamentally undermining trust in politics. But for once we can take Boris Johnson at his word: he won’t be doing anything to fix the real problems in our electoral process. Because it’s not in his interest to do so.

Peter Geoghegan is investigations editor at openDemocracy and author of Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics