Electoral Administration Bill

I welcome the view of the Government on this: I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield. I have been in a town hall at five o’clock on the last day for applications for postal votes when people come in at the last minute with hundreds of applications. People may think that that is associated sometimes with dodgy practices—there is no doubt that that has happened—but it is not necessarily that. If people are able to hold applications back until the last possible moment, they will do so. One reason for that is to prevent other candidates and parties from knowing who has applied for postal votes. Political parties, therefore, are unable to target postal voters in the way in which they might, given their increasing numbers. Having this measure at an early stage is beneficial to the democratic process. It is also beneficial for people who want to scrutinise the list. If the timing is too late, you may not even get the lists from the returning officers because they might not have had the time to send them out. If they have a lot to do under the pressure of an election, they do not always regard sending lists to candidates and parties as top of their priorities. So I welcome these changes, which I think have taken place already through regulations. I also welcome the proposal that the last day for late registrations should be the eleventh day before a poll rather than the fifth for the same reasons. I can envisage that in some areas a lot of late registrations will arrive. People will turn up at five o’clock on the last day on which they can do so—or whenever the deadline is for doing that—and put them all on the desk. That will make it very difficult indeed for anybody else to scrutinise those applications to be on the electoral register, not least because during an election campaign you are doing other things such as talking to voters. You do not have time to do all this bureaucratic stuff. There is a real possibility that late registration will lead in some places to attempts at electoral fraud by putting on the electoral register people who ought not to be there, and it will be too late and too difficult to challenge that. There is a real possibility that that will happen. Therefore, I support what the Government are doing in giving a little more time between the last day for registration and polling day.