Electoral Administration Bill

I have one or two questions, because I still seek to be convinced that this national scheme is required. Perhaps at the end of our proceedings in Committee I will be convinced. However, I want to return to what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, about multi-constituency voting. What actual evidence do we have of that? We presume that it is happening, but what evidence is there for it? The noble Lord said, in justifying the national CORE scheme, that it was the issue of fraud that determined his support for it. If that is one of its elements, there must be some material that is unavailable to me, but that perhaps other noble Lords possess. Regarding checking, this scheme is not built to cope with a national identity card. That is outside the scope of our discussions—it is not even a consideration. Therefore, without a national identity card identifier, in terms of a number, I cannot see in what circumstances one would know who to look for in relation to multi-constituency voting. I cannot work out the conditions under which, say, someone in London would be able to check whether someone had voted in Workington and Croydon at the same time. How would they know who to look for unless they had that national identity identifier—which they will not have, because it is not part of the scheme? So I am beginning to have questions about what is driving this scheme on.