Voting Blogs: The sham of voter registration in the UK | openDemocracy

If it wasn’t bad enough having 8 million people missing from the electoral register, they will soon be joined by as many as 1.85 million more individuals who look set to drop off from 1 December, as a result of the Government’s decision to bring forward changes to how we register to vote. That near-10 million people equates to 19% of all eligible adults not being on the electoral register. How is this happening? Why isn’t there a public outcry? The reason is probably because the bulk of those not registered or about to drop off are already on the margins of society. They are the young, the poor, those who move regularly from one private rented accommodation to another, and the newcomers for whom English isn’t a first language. In fact, these non-voters are the very people who need a voice most. 
The forthcoming drop-off is due to the Government’s decision to bring forward the full introduction of Individual Electoral Registration (IER) by 12 months to 1 December 2015. Designed to reduce fraud and make the electoral register more accurate, councils have been comparing the names on their existing voter lists with HMRC and DWP records: anyone who could not be matched was asked to re-register, but this time they also had to provide their National Insurance number.
New voters were also required to register individually, thus ending the system whereby one person in the household could register everyone else. The changes first came in last summer. As a consequence there were one million fewer people on the register than the previous year. The bulk of these were students who would have previously been mass registered by their universities.
Full Article: The sham of voter registration in the UK | openDemocracy.