THE VOTER ID scheme has been labelled a fiasco after it has been revealed that around 4000 people were turned away from their polling stations. The Labour Party have called for the scheme to scrapped after the failures across 21% of the 243 polling stations, which saw multiple people being denied their right to vote.
This is a dark day for British politics and it will certainly disenfranchise vulnerable people in the future, if the scheme is rolled out nationwide across the country.
Is voter ID necessary?
The idea behind voter ID is an authoritarian ideal to be able to purposefully disenfranchise the vulnerable within society from voting, the ones who are most affected by the policies enacted.
What is interesting is that Theresa May believes that this is something that is needed, as if voter fraud is a real issue within the UK. There were certainly reports of students ‘voting twice’ after the 2017 general election, a point that any right-wing individual is all too pleased to highlight and claim to be definitively true.
In reality, voter fraud is barely on the radar of political issues, in fact, it shouldn’t even be main news and it certainly shouldn’t influence policy in this manner. The Electoral Commission watchdog found only 28 cases of “personation” - voter fraud by claiming a false identity - in local and national elections in 2017. However, a total of 32,204,124 people turned out to vote in the 2017 general election.
