We Don't Need Voter ID
A countermeasure that doesn't work to fix a problem that doesn't exist.
Dateline: Woking, 29th January 2022.
Our Prime Minister (as of this morning, that is) Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson once wrote about identity cards that if he were ever asked to produce one as "evidence that I am who I say I am" that he would take it out of his wallet and “physically eat it”. I think that he implicitly meant a card specifically produced for the purpose of demonstrating the holders identity, not just some other card that was initially intended for some other purposes but that is being used as a substitute for an identity card in certain specific circumstances, such as voting, if you see what I mean. That’s fortunate, because Mr. Johnson’s MPs have just backed a law to make voter ID mandatory in elections. The Elections Bill, which will force voters to present a photo ID before they can vote, passed by 325 votes to 234 at its third reading in the Commons.
Since Britain doesn't have an ID card, Mr. Johnson will thankfully be spared the indignity of eating his ID card (or, presumably, his phone) at the polling station.
What else could he eat instead? Well, a quarter of the British electorate lack either of the principal photo ID documents, a passport or a driving licence. Thus the government will allow people to vote using a variety of “ID documents”. The actual list includes:
Various (ie, not all) concessionary travel passes;
Ministry of Defence identity cards;
Photocard parking permits issued as part of the Blue Badge scheme;
Driver’s licenses and Passports;
Free voter ID cards provided by local authorities.
The government FAQ also says that expired photographic identification will also be accepted “if the photograph is of a good enough likeness to allow polling station staff to confirm the identity of the holder” and that councils will be required to provide a voter ID card free of charge. When you go to a polling station to vote, then, you will need to produce either
some photo ID document that the chap at the polling station cannot conceivably verify anyway (in Britain polling stations are manned by cheerful local volunteers, not ex-Israeli airport security counterfeit document detection experts);
some sort of document wholly unsuited to the purpose such as a travel pass for old people (as it happens, due to my advanced years, I have one of these, so I can testify to the watertight security of the issuing process) but not a travel pass for young people, or
a “voter ID card” of the kind that Mr. Johnson would certainly want to eat. These “voter ID cards” will be issued by councils under the military-grade security that we traditionally associate with the provision of our local public services.
What on earth is the point of all this? If you are wondering why Britain is about to demand a photo ID that many people do not have in order to solve a problem that does not exist (Britain doesn't have a problem with voters being impersonated at the polling station in the first place* ), I’m not sure I can explain other than to see it as some sort of irrelevant political theatre.
It is, however, a subject of some personal interest. This is because my home town of Woking, one of the few places in England where people have been jailed for electoral fraud in recent memory, was part of the government's original voter ID pilot scheme which trialled different types of identification, including formal correspondence such as a utilities bill. (Yes, really. I should explain here for foreign readers that in the UK we see the British Gas quarterly bill as a uniquely trusted document.)
Great British Way
To me, the voter ID law represents a wonderful, pragmatic British compromise - a countermeasure that doesn't solve a problem that doesn’t exist - to avoid dealing with the real problem: the electoral fraud that does not happen at the polling booth. The main source of such fraud in the UK is not personation at the polling station but fraudulently-completed postal ballots, a situation that led one British judge to call it "a system that would disgrace a banana republic". As far as I can understand it from reading the various reports, including the source reports on electoral fraud in the UK, the main problem is that postal votes are being completed by third parties, sometimes in bulk, which is why the Cabinet Office’s own report on the ID pilots in Woking and elsewhere said that “electoral services teams delivering the postal pilots were not confident that the requirements piloted would decrease electoral fraud”. That’s how Sir Humphrey says “pointless”.
No proof of identity is going to make any difference to this and so long as we allow people to continue voting by post I can't see how the situation will improve because while it is not beyond the wit of man to come up with alternatives to the postal vote, that's not what is being proposed as part of the Bill. The UK government is not currently proposing an app or any other kind of electronic voting here, it is merely proposing to add a basic test of identity at the ballot box.
Dr Jess Garland, Director of Policy and Research at the Electoral Reform Society, sums up the situation rather well: “What the evidence does show is that far more people are likely to be prevented from voting than have ever been accused of personation fraud”.
The Right Way
The real way forward is, of course, not about using gas bills or indeed special-purpose election ID cards only for the purposes of voting, or a national identity scheme that Mr. Johnson dreads, but a general-purpose National Entitlement Scheme (NES). This sort of thing has been put forward for decades by informed industry observers (eg, me) but I think it now has added momentum because of the combination of technological evolution in the field of identification, authentication and (in particular) authorisation as well as the COVID-related pressure to manage medical credentials and the incredible problem of fraud through the pandemic. Much as a person should be able to demonstrate that they have been vaccinated without giving away personal details so should they be allowed to vote without disclosing their identity.
The key technology enabler here is that of the "verifiable credential" (VC) and the ability to create and present credentials that demonstrate proofs rather than data. This is often explained through the canonical example of proving to a bar that you are over 21 without providing a date of birth or age. As The Economist explained recently, individuals can be identified to (for example) a smartphone app much in the same way as for online banking, authenticated against their smartphone using biometrics and then when seeking entrance to a "COVID-secure" venue the app can respond to the venue's requests for credentials (such as a valid test certificate) with a simple "yes" or "no" and nothing else. The individual's name, age, address, the date of their vaccination and the like would not be transmitted from the app.
It seems a pretty small step to present the credential ENTITLED_TO_VOTE using a similar mechanism at the polling station. Or, indeed, anywhere else, such as to an authorised official visiting a hospital or a care home armed with specialist equipment (ie, a mobile phone) to capture and record the votes of people unable to come to a polling station in person.
* There was precisely one conviction for "personation" fraud in the UK in 2019.
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