Dozens of residents were turned away from voting at this month’s local elections in South Gloucestershire because they did not have the correct ID. A total of 58 people attending a polling station on Thursday, May 4, were refused a ballot paper because of controversial new laws requiring proof of identification for the first time.
Initially, 216 electors were unable to vote in the elections for the unitary authority and the district’s town and parish councils, but 158 of them – almost three-quarters – returned with accepted photo ID and cast a ballot. South Gloucestershire Council says it is “delighted” that 99.9 per cent of those who attended polling stations could vote.
The number of those denied the right to vote was much less than some other local authorities, such as Bradford where 1,261 people were initially turned away, of which 498 did not return to cast a ballot. But it was still significantly higher than several other councils, including Bromsgrove where 42 voters were rejected, of which 25 returned with correct ID, and Great Yarmouth, where 21 of the 42 people who were turned away came back to vote.
Read more: South Gloucestershire Council voter ID row over 'rushed and ill-conceived' new law
And concerns have been raised that the figures give only a partial picture because they do not include those who left before entering the polling station having been reminded about the new rules in the queue or outside, as well as those put off from going in the first place because of the ID requirement. Shortly after the polls closed, the Electoral Commission, which is set to publish initial findings next month into how the scheme worked followed by a full report in September, said the new policy “posed a greater challenge for some groups in society”.
On Monday, former cabinet minister and North East Somerset MP Jacob Rees-Mogg suggested that the voter ID reforms had been an attempt to “gerrymander” – manipulate an election to favour one party – rather than the stated aim of tackling election fraud. He said it had backfired on the Conservatives who lost more than 1,000 seats across the country, including the overall majority on South Gloucestershire Council.
Mr Rees-Mogg, who backed the new law while serving in Boris Johnson and Liz Truss’s governments, told the National Conservatism conference in Westminster: “Parties that try to gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them, as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections. We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well.”
According to Electoral Commission statistics, there were just seven alleged cases where an individual pretended to be someone else at the polling station in 2022, none of whom received further action. At the 2023 South Gloucestershire local elections, 43,798 electors cast a ballot out of the 213,986 registered to vote, a turnout of 33.57 per cent which was up from 32 per cent in 2019.
The council issued 248 voter authority certificates before polling day for people without photo ID, whose photo no longer looks like them or whose name differs from that on the electoral roll. Returning officer John McCormack, who was responsible for running the elections, said: “I am delighted that the overwhelming majority of those who wanted to take part in these elections were able to do so.
“We want everyone who wants to take part to be able to do so, which is why we worked hard in the months leading up to the elections to make sure people knew about the new rules that we had to implement.” He said staff on polling day managed the “biggest change to the way we vote in this country in decades” and things ran smoothly.
Mr McCormack added: “We will not be complacent, however, we don’t want to have to turn away anyone who makes the effort to come out to vote on election day. As a council, we will work hard before any elections to make sure that people know about the rules, and that they have the right photo ID, including by providing voter authority certificates, which are available free of charge to anyone eligible to vote.”
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