#HandsOffOurVote - Scrap the government's voter ID law
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Sign up to get involved with our campaign as we work to convince MPs to rethink voter IDs.
The UK government is planning to change your voting rights.
They have introduced a proposal to require all voters to provide photographic voter ID to vote in all National and Local elections starting in 2023. If this becomes law, potentially hundreds of thousands of voters will be turned away from the polls because of the government's decision to introduce more complexity and bureacracy to the voting system.
The Government knows this will result in voters being turned away from the polls.
The Government tested this themselves, and the results are damning. According the Electoral Commission's own study, in 2018 a pilot program in a few localities saw over 1,000 voters turned away for incorrect ID, and over 300 did not return to vote. We know this law will prevent voters from exercising their democratic rights.
3.5 million Brits have no form of legal ID (Source: House of Commons Library)
So why is the Government doing this? The government has said that it is trying to ensure confidence in elections by removing the potential for fraud. Only one problem: we have had one case of proven impersonation fraud in the 2017-2019 elections. Not one thousand, or one hundred: one (Source: Electoral Commission). Restricting the rights of millions of British people because of a non-existent crime is an obvious attempt to restrict our ability to vote and an affront the democratic process.
This is not a partisan issue. Democracy works best when we allow as many people to vote as possible. We all need to have a stake in our government so it can work for us.
We know that our elections are secure, so we need to make it easier to vote, not harder!
Why are we running this campaign?
We’ve started #HandsOffOurVote to bring together people who are passionate about our democracy. We are a group of young campaigners who know that Photographic voter ID in the UK at best is expensive and unnecessary and at worst it could disenfranchise millions of voters. We should be encouraging more people to take part in elections, not making it harder.
Find out more at: www.handsoffourvote.org
Thank you for being a part of this!
