Minister hints at automatic re-registration rather than requiring everyone to register each year

Minister for Constitutional Reform John Penrose has suggested the annual canvass to update the electoral rolls is outdated and unnecessary…

During a Commons debate on individual electoral registration (IER), Penrose said: “We should ask ourselves why we ask all those people to re-register every single year, once they have made their individual decision to register to vote.

“We do not ask them to re-register for their tax credits, their TV licence or their benefit claims every single year.”…

He added: “We could effectively do nine tenths of the annual canvass automatically in a trice just by running some cross-matching between existing databases and the electoral register. We could prove that 90% of people have not moved and are in the same situation.

“We could then focus our annual canvass efforts on the 10% who do not match up and who are causing the problem, on under-represented groups or on places that seem to have empty houses when we know that people are living there.” [UKAuthority.com]