Number of people registered to vote has fallen, new figures reveal

Dwindling: voters queue up at a polling station in Hackney last year.

The number of people registered to vote in Hackney has tumbled by 4.2 per cent since the 2015 General Election.

Newly-released figures from 22 May, the closing date for registration, show the total electorate in Hackney North and Stoke Newington is down from 88,153 two years ago to 83,905 in 2017 – a drop of 4.8 per cent.

The Hackney South and Shoreditch seat has seen a decline of 3.6 per cent, with 81,905 people registered for the upcoming election, compared to 84,971 in 2015.

The lack of up-to-date population data makes it impossible to ascertain whether waning voter numbers are due to a fall in the overall population or a failure by the council to compile a complete electoral roll. The evidence points towards the latter.

Between 2011 and 2015, the borough’s population grew at a rate of over 5,000 per year, suggesting that even a minor post-Brexit exodus would have done little to dent a steady rise in the number of residents eligible to vote at General Elections – especially as this figure does not include European Union nationals.

A more likely reason is that Hackney Council officials have not managed to produce an accurate list of eligible electors.

Voter registration has long been a challenge in Hackney. A 2015 Electoral Commission report singled out the borough as the local authority with the most inaccurate voter roll in Great Britain. Part of the problem appears to be the large number of historic duplicate entries on the register, which were removed when the new system of individual voter registration was introduced three years ago.

A report published last year by London First and Democracy Club suggests that the problem is deeper, with the Town Hall’s elections department struggling to engage the local citizenry despite the fact that enrolment is compulsory and non-registrants can be fined £80.

But Hackney Council blamed the new registration system, introduced in 2014, for the dwindling electorate. Previously, one person was in charge of registering everyone in their household, but the new rules mean each resident must now sign up separately to be eligible to vote.

Returning Officer Tim Shields said: “The new individual electoral registration system meant that a number of electors who had not individually registered were removed from the electoral register in December 2015, this was in accordance with the legislation.

“The electors who were removed were those who we had not heard from for two years, despite repeated attempts to contact them. It is our view that, given the high turnover rate of electors in the borough, the vast majority of those that were deleted in December 2015 were no longer eligible to vote in Hackney.

“We’ve gone to great lengths since 2015 to encourage people to register, from advertising campaigns to letters to residents who had not yet registered. Between the General Election being called on 18 April 2017 and the registration deadline on 22 May, we received over 35,000 applications to register to vote.”