For context the government is also proposing:
- Voter ID for voter disenfranchisement (Elections Bill)
- To rig elections in favour of the Conservatives and stifle opposition (Elections Bill)
- All but banning protests (Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill)
There is multi-pronged attack underway which is in no way hyperbole.
http://www.eoni.org.uk/Electoral-Identity-Card/Electoral-Ide...
And that this could potentially unfairly affect the results of elections, which is exactly the problem that voter ID is supposed to prevent
Isn't this a chicken and egg problem? Without voter ID we don't know whether fraud has taken place or not.
> there are hundreds of thousands of people in the UK who have the right to vote but cannot get ID
That is a wider problem that should be fixed. Agreed that in the current state it would cause friction for people to vote.
No, they keep a track of who has turned up to vote, if you are putting extra votes in or voting in someone else's name then either the number of votes and number of voters wont tally or you'll start seeing a significant number of people who have voted twice, once from the genuine voter and once the person who was fraudulently voting in someone else's name.
But I'm more inclined to suspect postal fraud. There was talk of students voting twice but whether that was a big thing is unknown. But clearly there has been some level of election fraud going on.
I was once encouraged by a canvasser to vote in my home town and where I was studying because 'they'll never know'.
The politics is odd; voters don't want mandatory ID cards, but they seem comfortable with legally requiring ID to rent or buy a house, have a job, have a bank account, and now voting.
I will not engage in a debate on voter id right now because of this (but thanks for attacking the weakest part of my post, using a throwaway :)