Those who attended the recent Solace election conference will have heard me talk about the increasing demands and challenges to our electoral services. Much of this is arising as a result of the increased use of the democratic process which is expanding in both number and range. The result being a greater range and spread of elections - including council tax referendums, neighbourhood planning referendums and police and crime commissioner elections - and ones which are also more variable in type with more now run as combined polls and some including different voting systems. Indeed, it would seem that there is now a growing industry seeking to increase democratic participation and allowing new forms of involvement to take place.
In addition to this, we are facing an increased emphasis on personal responsibility when it comes to registering to vote. The movement to Individual Electoral Registration will bring with it a number of implications, not least of all the requirement of individual citizens to take responsibility for their own registration in the same way that they do in other interactions with the state, such as obtaining a passport or driving licence. And looking to the future, online registration is beginning to modernise the electoral process at the margins.
Yet despite these increases in the number of elections and voting systems used, this is all occurring against a backdrop of decreasing voter participation - both in the number of people registered to vote and the number of those turning out to vote. Fewer people are choosing to vote and in some elections, for example the police and crime commissioner election in 2012, we saw a historically low level of turnout with just 15% of the population voting.
Basically, the British population doesn't vote in elections that aren't general.
The average turnout for parliamentary elections between 1918 and 2010 was a respectable 73.3% but the issue of participation in politics has received increasing attention in recent years due to the magnitude and sustained character of the recent decline in turnout.
In the 2001 parliamentary election, just 59.1% of the electorate voted. Not only did this represent a drop of over 12% on the turnout in 1997, but it was the lowest level of voting participation since the wartime election of 1918. And whilst there were signs of a recovery in later general elections, it has been slight – up to 61.2% in 2005 and 65.1% in 2010. This is despite various initiatives seeking to reengage citizens, including changing radically the postal voting and proxy voting rules to make it easier to do so.
Local elections, however, continue to decline, with the average turnout at the 2012 local elections standing at just 31.3% - falling from 42.6% at the 2011 local elections. This consistent decline suggests that British politics and, in fact, the democratic process itself, has become seriously disconnected from the public, raising some important questions about the effectiveness of British democracy. How do we really successfully increase participation in the democratic process and what is it that leads more and more people to feel disengaged in it? The challenge for all – both politicians and professionals – is to address this, not just the mechanisms by which our citizens are enabled to vote.
Dr Dave Smith is chief executive of Sunderland City Council and chair of the SOLACE Elections & Democracy Network Board.
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