Hundreds of thousands disappear off register ahead of mayoral election

The frontrunners in the mayoral election race: the Tories’ Zac Goldsmith and Labour candidate Sadiq Khan
Philip Toscano/PA Wire
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Hundreds of thousands of students and other young people have had their “vote taken away” by a controversial new voting registration system, shock figures suggested today.

They also showed a drop of more than 230,000 in the number of people registered to vote in London for the May 5 mayoral election.

Despite the capital’s growing population, the number of registered voters for local polls fell from 5,876,329 at the end of 2013 to 5,645,254 as of December 1, 2015.

An even more dramatic decline was seen among 16 and 17-year-olds in London who will turn 18 within the next two years — down by more than 20,000 from 51,182 in 2013 to 30,736 as of December.

The latest figures are the first using only the system of individual electoral registration which was pushed through by the Government a year early in the face of strong opposition.

It was introduced in June 2014 to tackle voter fraud and clean up the register, replacing the old system of registration by household.

But MPs, peers and electoral experts warned that it risked disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of people across the country as it would make it less likely that they would register.

The Electoral Commission was particularly alarmed in the fall in the number of “attainer” voters across the country, of 40 per cent between February/March 2014 and this December.

“This decline suggests that the requirement for attainers to register individual under IER, rather than be registered by a parent or guardian, is having a negative impact on the number registered,” it said.

The Commission highlighted big falls in the number of people registered to vote in university cities, down by 14 per cent in both Oxford and Cambridge between Feb/March 2014 and December 2015 and ten per cent in Southampton.

London’s population has been growing so the number of electors would have been expected to rise.

So the number of voters who have been taken off the London register is likely to be significantly more than 230,000.

The borough with the biggest fall from 2014 to 2015 was Redbridge, down 8.7 per cent, followed by Kensington and Chelsea, 8.2 per cent and Hackney, 6.6 per cent.

The figures sparked an immediate plea from Labour’s mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan to Londoners to register to vote on May 5 to choose Boris Johnson’s successor.

He said: “Despite the warnings that their plans would see Londoners lose their vote, including from the independent Electoral Commission, they’ve arrogantly ploughed on regardless. My message to Londoners is clear:

it is more important than ever that you register to vote and have your say. Don’t let the Tories take your vote away.”

Liberal Democrat mayoral contender Caroline Pidgeon said: “The Government were warned about the risks to of the electoral register of removing so many voters earlier than planned.

“It is a shameful railroading of our democracy by the Conservatives.”

The drops could be down to “churn” in voters, demographic changes, votingfraud, and more foreign owners of properties who do not vote in the UK.

The Cabinet Office said individual registration was “an essential measure” to tackle electoral fraud and to take “ghost voters” off the register.

“We have worked hard with local authorities to clean up the register — any entries removed will be people who have moved house, died or never existed because they were registered fraudulently,” said a spokeswoman.

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