Questions Over the Speed of the Voting Law Overhaul
The bill would let voters use bank cards without photographs as identification, lower the voting age to 16 and tighten rules on political donations. Ministers are reported to want Lords scrutiny cut from an anticipated ten days to fewer than five. The Electoral Commission warns accepting bank cards would make verifying voters harder.
The numbers behind the identification change are not trivial. The Electoral Commission found about 16,000 people who tried to vote in person were turned away for want of identification and did not come back, and separately that about 4% of those who did not vote in 2024 cited photo identification as a factor. Polling after that election found 6.5% of minority ethnic voters surveyed had been turned away at least once, against 2.5% of white voters. Mr Burnham himself, as one of seven Labour mayors in 2024, called the rules a “brazen assault on our democracy”. The donations clauses are where this meets the item above it, because restrictions under discussion could retrospectively affect the £72m given to Reform UK by the crypto billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne. The Liberal Democrat peer Mark Pack objects to amending the franchise without proper scrutiny and Conservative peers accuse ministers of rushing; the government says the bill “is going through the proper parliamentary process, giving MPs and peers the time and opportunity to examine and debate its measures”, and that the prime minister has ruled out an early election. The claim about compressing Lords time comes from another newspaper and is carried here as reported rather than established.