Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Missing voters: one cheer for Clegg

This is absolutely right:

Up to 3.5 million potential voters are to be targeted by the government as it seeks to ensure that the "missing millions" who fail to register are given a voice in elections, Nick Clegg will announce today. …
Clegg will say: "It is not good enough to simply ignore the millions who aren't registered, especially when you look more closely at where the problem is worst: among the young; among black and ethnic minority communities; in areas with high social deprivation."

Good. I hope it works.

My quibble is how this fits with the timing of the government’s boundary review, which seeks to cut 50 MPs and equalise constituency sizes. The review will take place before any voter registration push, and so the new constituency sizes will disregard these millions of people. The result will be to more deeply entrench an electoral system that under-represents “areas with high social deprivation”.

But it’s nice that Clegg now admits this.

No comments: