Clegg begins search for missing voters
By politics.co.uk staff
Millions of unregistered voters will be targeted by the government in a bid to increase turnouts, Nick Clegg will announce today.
The deputy prime minister will speak in Westminster to the Hansard society and the Political Studies Association – outlining how the government is looking to get apathetic voters registered.
Mr Clegg will say: “It’s true that around 90% of people are registered, which compares well internationally, and the registration rate do seems to have stabilised after a decline in the last decade, but it is not good enough to simply ignore the millions who aren’t.”
Local authorities will be given the power under the coalition’s proposals to compare government databases and the electoral roll to identify potential new voters, as many as 3.5 million according to the deputy prime minister, currently “missing” from the roll.
Young and ethnic minority voters are particularly poorly represented, Mr Clegg will argue. The Lib Dem leader will acknowledge that there is “no magic wand” to increase democratic participation.
He will also announce more frequent boundary reviews, “ending the outdated, haphazard arrangements used by the previous government.
“It simply cannot be right that the last election was run on boundaries that were ten years old.”
The move comes as opposition parties attack the government for equalising constituency boundaries without an up-to-date figure on how many eligible voters there are, a decision which critics say would disenfranchise many ethnic minorities and young people.
