The leader of the Local Government Association’s (LGA) Labour Group has urged Parliament to intervene to prevent up to 3,000,000 people becoming politically disenfranchised after May’s General Election.
Cllr Jim McMahon made the admonition before next week’s publication by voting watchdog the Electoral Commission of headline national figures for voting lists, following the shift to Individual Electoral Registration (IER).
As a safeguard measure, the updated registers will automatically ‘carry over’ to this May’s polls many hundreds of thousands of voters lost in the transition to IER.
But the LGA Labour Group has compiled exclusive research indicating the number of ‘carried over’ voters who could subsequently drop off the new registers – by either December 2015 or December 2016 – could run into the millions.
