Call for reform after 3.7 million eligible voters are not registered

[T_i_B]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/09/06/nvote06.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/09/06/ixportal.html

The Government is facing calls to reform the way people register to vote after it was revealed that up to 3.7 million of those eligible in England and Wales are not on the electoral register.

The Electoral Commission, which conducted the research, said it was time ministers made individuals, not heads of households, responsible for registering voters, to increase participation rates and to end the potential for abuse of the postal voting system.

The research, the first of its kind since 1993, and based on a sample of 23,963 eligible adults, showed that between eight and nine per cent of the population failed to appear on the register, against between seven and eight per cent 12 years ago.

Among those aged aged 18-24, the level was 16 per cent. Just two per cent of those aged 65 failed to appear on the register. Overall, people from ethnic minority groups were about three times as likely to be unregistered as white people (17 per cent compared with six per cent), although levels of non registration varied sharply among "sub-groups".

[tjwmason]

1. One of the benefits of our system is that it is responsive

i.e., each house gets the letter through the post-box so we can simply tick the right boxes and sent it back (or even telephone/internets now).

If we moved to individual registration this would be far more difficult to achieve - it then becomes a pro-active system (each individual has to make the active choice to register), which I think would send registration rates falling dramatically.