Local elections 2023: Voter ID backfired on Tories

No wonder Starmer wants to give the vote to EU nationals and 16 year olds, voter ID must be making it more and more difficult for Labour to fiddle votes, they were caught out with postal fraud, with dead people and empty properties voting Labour ....... LOL ... poor old desperate Starmer, if he gives dogs and cats votes he can train their paws to vote Labour.

It is no secret and in fact blatantly obvious that the major motivation behind the scheme to solve an almost non-existent problem by requiring voter ID was a gerrymandering impulse for voter suppression. The obvious intent was to make it less likely that those least likely to vote conservative, mostly young people and poor people, would be able to vote at all. The intent to make it harder for younger people than for older ones was blatantly obvious considering the fact that the number of ID options permissible for older people ran well into double figures, whilst the options for young voters numbered only two or three. It is particularly notable for example that an older person's bus pass was considered acceptable ID but a younger person's student railcard was not.

I suspect it might have backfired because most of the young people without acceptable ID were the ones who didnt normally vote anyway, so it actually had little effect in suppressing the youth vote. Same could be said for the poor vote. But there may well have been numbers of older people who lacked any of the many acceptable forms if ID made available to them who normally did vote but got turned away.

I know locally there was a lot of info on the internet from parties, groups and individuals making young people aware and pointing out that if they couldn't produce valid ID they could instead apply for a postal vote. So very few of those interested enough to bother amongst young people got turned away. Most were clued up enough unless they were not interested in voting anyway.

Older people though tend much more often out of habit to vote in person and have done so all their lives without needing ID and some older people have never gotten on to the internet and may not have been aware enough of the changes.

It really would be justice if the Tory attempt at voter suppression worked more against their own voters than anyone else's. lol

Either way, the numbers are being crunched as we speak and we need to await more data on exactly who wanted to vote but couldnt. As opposed to those simply choosing not to. When some of this information is collated and provided we will have a clearer picture.

If requiring ID to vote is a form of voter suppression why did Labour impose it on Northern Ireland and why do they use it in their internal elections?

Does Labour now support voter supression?

For the past few years, when I've voted in Labour elections (NEC, etc), it's been online. My voting info' in the post has two pin numbers which I enter, and then vote.

I think it's the same with other online votes I've had - BAFTA, the National Trust, Amnesty International, Writer's Guild, etc..

It's a pretty standard way of voting, and one assumes it's secure.

If parties REALLY want to increase participation in our democracy, surely it's long overdue to allow us to vote on our phones?

It won't be easy.

Oh dear.😒

You well know as I do that it was not voter suppression. 


In Northern Ireland the law requires that you produce one of seven forms of photographic identification when you vote at a polling station. This is under the Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act 2002, which was introduced to counter the

lack of public confidence in the electoral process.

There was no such lack of public confidence in the rest of the UK.