Electoral Commission’s chief praises parties but criticises Government

During the week Peter Wardle, the Electoral Commission’s Chief Executive, gave a speech to local government chief executives about how elections are run in this country. He both had nice things to say about political parties and threw a few barbed comments in the direction of the Government.

First, the niceness:

We’re very conscious indeed that without effective political parties and candidates, politics can’t get off first base.

We’re very conscious that the vast majority of those who get involved with election campaigns are volunteers – they do it because they care, and they do it on top of all their other commitments.

And we’re very conscious that not everyone who gets involved in politics does so through a political party – 10 per cent of the councillors elected in England and Wales are independents.

It’s worth pausing to consider what candidates and parties expect from us at election time.

They expect and deserve clear, timely and easily accessible information about how to take part, and the rules they need to follow. There are plenty of good examples of this around, especially where Returning Officers make sure that likely candidates have the chance to get briefed well in advance of elections.

And they expect and deserve a transparent process, open to scrutiny. In practice, that means consistent application of the rules, with a clear mechanism for sorting out any problems; and accurate results.

The reference to “plenty of good examples around” highlights that there is work that many councils can do to improve the way elections are run. The speech went through at some length some of the measures being taken, such as the introduction of performance standards.

And then there were the barbed comments about the Government’s enthusiasm for electoral pilots but unwillingness to move on individual registration:

A strategy for modernising our electoral system needs to go well beyond continuing with a fairly random pattern of voluntary and small-scale e-voting pilots.  We first need to take a step back and resolve some fundamental  questions about the system itself.

And that should start with registration.

Registering by household was introduced in a different era.  And it belongs in a different era.  It’s not right in the 21st century for our democratic process to be founded on a system where someone called ‘head of the household’ can influence who else gets the vote…

The Electoral Commission’s been calling for this change for more than 5 years – since 2003.   We’re not alone – we’ve been joined by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe; the Committee on Standards in Public Life; the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust; and the judge who heard the petitions in Birmingham and Slough.  All of them support a change to individual registration.  And the most recent survey of public attitudes by the Committee on Standards in Public Life found that nearly two-thirds of the people they spoke to seem to favour a move to individual registration.

The front benches of the main political parties at Westminster all now support it.  The Government says it supports individual registration in principle, but has so far opposed attempts to legislate for the change.

That may seem a fairly mild comment to those used to robust political debate, but in context it’s a frank criticism of the Government – ‘you claim you’re in favour of this, loads of other people are in favour of this, so why do you mess around with other things instead of getting on with it?’ Which is a very good question.