Voter Exclusion Policies - how many Charlburians excluded? (Debate)

Sat 6 May 2023, 17:19

The short answer to Malcom's questions was "no" to both. The WODC officials running the poll were there to follow the law - and the Conservative government, instructing its MPs to vote for its programme, clearly had no interest in whether the "mandatory photo ID" law solved a problem that really existed. So it made no attempt - like requiring polling officers to report people claiming to be someone they weren't - to establish whether the law was achieving its desired effect. Or whether there might be a better way of so doing if it wasn't.

Meantime, the ONLY non-officials there for any period were the LibDem tellers: the activists trying to make sure their fellow-activists didn't nag people who'd already voted into voting. (the Tories and Labour seem not to be bothered any more - either to chase up potential voters or to avoid chasing the wrong people up). And they're explicitly banned by law from interfering with the officials' conduct of their job.

The irony, though, was that if voting was suppressed, it wasn't in the way a competent Tory administration would have wanted it to be suppressed. Votes cast on Thursday were 47.2% of the electorate - down from 48.7% in 2019 when Andy last stood. I'd say that, given the complete lack of Tory campaigning here (for the first time in living memory, there were more visible Labour posters than Tory) and the growth in absentee landlords, that 1.5% fall wasn't surprising.

What, arguably, was more surprising was:

• That the Charlbury fall was in Tory voters (-23%), while the anti-Tory vote grew 7.7%. If Johnson, Braverman and Sunak were trying to suppress anti-Tory voters, they messed that up in Charlbury, didn't they?   But then...
• Anecdotally: I've been telling here for nearly 20 years, and I've never seen so many youngish voters - the people most worriers thought the Tories wanted to suppress. Indeed, I even saw family groups making a public celebration of youngsters' first vote  (which I've never seen before) - and  at peak times there was a procession of twenty-somethings taking their driving licences out of their wallets as they crossed the Memorial Hall courtyard.

I'd put the Tories' attempts to suppress votes in the same basket as most of their other policies since 2010: sloppily conceived, not properly monitored and ultimately counterproductive.