The government has legislated for a free voter ID certificate applied via an online portal with certificates delivered by local councils. Apply on GOV.UK.
Whilst the certificate itself does not come with a charge – accessing it may not be cost-neutral. Voters may need to find somewhere to access a computer, pay for travel to a library or take time off work to match library opening hours. As the Joseph Rountree Foundation highlights:
“It’s not easy, or necessarily going to be a priority, to apply to your local authority for a free Voter Card if you’re working in an insecure job with irregular, unpredictable and long hours, or juggling multiple jobs to make ends meet while also managing caring responsibilities and health needs.”
Delays to legislation mean councils have very little time to prepare for these changes and notify voters of what they need to do if they don’t have ID before the elections in May.
Indeed, birth certificate. Photographic evidence will only be accepted if the jobs worth deem it as a recognisable likeness. Postal voting is likely to be more of a problem.
Had a postal vote for years.
The nearest post box is outside the polling station!
It seems my Wales travelcard( bus pass to the uninitiated) would be acceptable I.D.if I stopped doing that.
*This morning the government and Electoral Commission have launched a website to apply for a voter ID card, ahead of the ID requirement coming into force for local elections in May. The deadline is 5pm on Tuesday 25 April, and is only intended for the tiny number of UK voters who don’t already have a passport, driver’s licence or concessionary travel passes.Hardly the fascistic end to democracy being claimed by certain lefties…
The move has inexplicably been slammed as racist by woke campaign groups, who rely on the law of low expectations to argue BAME groups are more likely not to have any of the above three forms of ID, and so may be locked out of the democratic system.
To see just how racist the new system is, Guido applied for one of the new Voter IDs via the government website, using a stopwatch to time the process from stop to start.
All that’s required is a passport-style photo, and you National Insurance number. With neither of these prepared in advance before starting the online form, Guido still managed to whizz through it in just three minutes and 18 seconds. All you need to know are your name and address. To argue ethnic minorities are unable to do this frankly seems racist…
The research I have seen suggested the ID requirements may be discriminatory (but not necessarily “racist”)
The differences reported by the official government research and survey showed the different demographics re being less likely to have photo ID or being less likely to apply for it or a disincentive to vote were not related to race but related to disabilities, lower levels of education and older age groups.
The differences between each of those groups was only a matter of a couple of % but some of the differences were quite marked.
For example,
“… there was a clear link between disability and perceptions of difficulty: 12% of respondents with a severely limiting disability and eight per cent of those with a somewhat limiting difficulty said that having to present photo ID at the polling station would make voting difficult, compared with four per cent of those with no disability.”
This is from the Government’s own published research.
Unfortunately Cinders I’ve only got the union flag tattooed on my left buttock, and the white rose of Yorkshire tattooed on my right buttock…
All this voter ID won’t apply in the future when an ID chip is injected into babies along with their many vaccines.
