Electoral & Land Charges Manager to give a verbal presentation.
Minutes:
The Committee received a verbal presentation from the Electoral and Land Charges Manager on the recently implemented Individual Electoral Registration (IER) system.
IER represented the biggest change to voter registration in 100 years. Following implementation on June 2014, every individual was now responsible for their own voter registration where previously the ‘head of household’ was responsible for registering everyone who lived at an address. Individuals were now able to register to vote online and were now required to provide a few more details when registering to vote including their National Insurance Number and date of birth. Applications were sent to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for verification and should an application fail, it would go through the verification exception process where an applicant would be required to provide other prescribed forms of identification.
The majority of the electorate in Eastbourne had been automatically transferred over to the new IER system following verification with DWP. The Committee were advised that 15,799 electors returned as partially matched or no match. 7,832 electors from this group had since been transferred over to IER following a further match with Council tax and benefits data.
The Electoral and Land Charges Manager outlined the correspondence with those electors who had been rejected through the process that included invitation to register letters being posted and canvassers visiting properties, where an elector was required to supply a date of birth and National Insurance number.
IER was funded by central government and Eastbourne Borough Council had received funding of £62,333 that covered the whole process.
The implementation of IER had led to an extremely busy period for Electoral Services, especially during the summer months of 2014 where they were receiving up to 1,000+ calls a day. The Electoral Administration software used by Electoral Services had to be almost completely rewritten, which had an impact on the timetable of work for those involved. Additional temporary staff were brought in to assist with the IER process and one of them visited the Borough’s residential care homes.
The first IER register was published on the 1 December 2014 and the Electoral and Land Charges Manager reported that the electorate for Eastbourne was 73,132 which was on par with previous registers. The Committee was advised that no individual would be removed from the electoral register for not registering under IER. A date would be set by Government following the May 2015 elections for removing these individuals should they fail to register.
Electors who previously held a postal or proxy vote must be registered under IER for the 2015 elections or their vote would be deleted and they would need to vote at a polling station. Only 200 absent voters had not yet been registered under IER. Party agents would be entitled on a set date to a list of electors, indicating those not registered under IER.
The Committee was advised that work would take place to assess the accuracy of the register and there was a possibility that additional funding would be granted to fund a form of canvass in the New Year. It was reported that problems could be encountered should political parties and party activists send out postal vote applications without knowledge of whether that elector was registered under IER and giving out incorrect information. Following a question from the Committee the Electoral and Land Charges Manager advised that all party agents would be briefed outlining these concerns.
In response to a question on whether electors would now be required to bring their polling card to polling stations when voting or a similar form of identification, the Electoral and Land Charges Manager responded that there were currently no plans nationally to introduce this requirement.
The Committee was advised that there was prescribed legislation that outlined what electoral data could be used for. It was possible that should a property be discovered to be empty through the registration process, that property could be added to the empty properties list. For the majority of cases information on empty properties was sourced from other Council data.
The Committee expressed their thanks to the Electoral and Land Charges Manager for her presentation and asked that thanks be passed on to the Electoral Services team for their hard work during the integration of IER.
NOTED.