Minister shares vision for future of British elections at conference in Blackpool

MP Chloe Smith, Cabinet Minister for Constitution, appeared at a conference for the Association of Electoral Administrators at The Grand Hotel yesterday to thank them for their hard work during the December election.

Chloe set out her hopes for the future of British democracy and the changes she hopes to make to the election process, including canvass reform, voter ID and the abolition of the ‘15 year rule’, which means that UK ex-pats lose their vote after 15 years.

She said: “What we will see over the coming years, starting this year. is that it will be made much easier for people to get registered to vote. We have seen good progress on that already, for example in the whole North West in 2019 we saw a 20 per cent rise in the number or people registering to vote.

“In this country we are responsible for registering ourselves to vote. What this is about is making sure that councils can do this as effectively as possible; not coming to people’s doors with endless papers to fill in but instead to encourage to register those who have perhaps been hardest to identify. It’s about using councils’ resources to focus their efforts to get the most complete electoral roll.

“We’re going to be moving to a system where we will be asking people to identify themselves before they get their ballot paper. It’s important that a person’s vote is theirs and theirs alone, and it would be a crime to steal it. We all want our elections to be safe.

“We’re confident this will be a really positive way for people to gain confidence in their democracy. We’re committed to rolling it out before the next election.”

She added; “We have now left the EU and the Prime Minister has set out his ambitions for our future relationship with Europe. My role in that will be to make that a resonating success. I want to focus on making sure our democracy remains trusted at home and respected around the world.”