Ed Miliband will accuse Nick Clegg on Friday of delivering “the final insult” to young people, claiming that electoral changes mean 1 million people, many of them students, have fallen off the voters’ register in the past year.
The Labour leader blames the dramatic drop-off on a switch from household to individual voter registration. Universities and colleges have also been stopped from block-registering their students.
Miliband will launch a voter-registration drive in Clegg’s constituency, Sheffield Hallam, claiming the deputy prime minister and David Cameron “are sitting by and watching hundreds of thousands of young people in our country lose their democratic rights”.
Miliband’s lost voters figure is based on an analysis of 373 local authorities showing in 307 authorities a 1,016,024 fall in the number of registered voters in 2015 compared with 2014. Overall the fall is 950,845 voters.
The reductions are heavily concentrated in university towns and cities with a fall of 23,538 voters in Cardiff, or 8.9%. In Liverpool the fall is 20,633 (6.4%) and in Southampton 14,028 or (7.9%). In Westminster the fall is 10,793 (7.8%) and in Birmingham, it is 7,164.
Clegg is ministerially responsible for the electoral register reforms, and his aides insist he has found an extra £10m to deal with any problems and ensure there are effective voter registration drives before the election.
Liberal Democrat sources pointed out Labour had supported the switch to individual registration, and even if there was a fall in first-year students registering in university towns, many could still vote in their constituency home.
A party source said: “As a result of the move to individual voter registration freshers who have recently moved into student halls of residence this autumn are having to register individually when previously they would have been block-registered. This has inevitably led to a significant reduction in registration rates.”Chris Ruane, a Labour MP on the political and constitutional affairs select committee (PCASC), said: “Students are dropping off the register like flies and this could have potentially serious effects in the election, but also for any redrawing of the constituency boundaries after the general election.”
The falls come on top of what was already an increasingly inadequate register. Research by the Electoral Commission suggests as many as 6 million were missing from the old household register, but these latest figures suggest a further reduction is under way.
It has been estimated at the time of the 2010 election only 55% of students were registered and only 45% of them voted.
Miliband will say: “In the last year almost 1 million people have fallen off the electoral register, hundreds of thousands of them young people. This is a direct consequence of government’s decisions to ignore warnings that rushing through new individual registration reforms would damage democracy.”
The Cabinet Office insists the switch to individual voter registration, prompted by fears of electoral fraud, will not affect the general election since anyone on the old household register in December 2013 will be entitled to vote in 2015, so long as they have not moved house in the interim in which case they will need to re-register. But many students will be in this situation.
Giving evidence to the PCASC this week Lewis Baston, director of research at the Electoral Reform Society, said Britain had not yet reached the stage of voter suppression seen in some US states, but was heading that way now the register had become so inadequate.
He warned: “Anyone that looks for a moment at the pattern of falls on the register both on the old and new register can see it is young people, people who move house and people in temporary accommodation who are falling off the register.”
Clegg’s aides said: “Instead of trying to score political points Labour should be working with local authorities to ensure that the large amount of money available is spent helping people, particularly students, register to vote.”
