Gloucestershire County Council will not be calling on the Government to scrap plans to introduce voter ID in the UK.
Liberal Democrat County Councillors presented a motion this week which called on the local authority to ask the Government to scrap proposed legislation that could disenfranchise voters.
They called on fellow councillors to join with them in opposing the Electoral Integrity Bill which would introduce a requirement for photo ID to be produced at all polling stations in the future.
Research by the Cabinet Office, released in March, has shown that nearly 10 per cent of the public don’t have the necessary photo ID.
The Liberal Democrats say this equates to nearly 50,000 eligible voters in Gloucestershire.
Councillors Paul Hodgkinson and Ben Evans put forward the motion which also asked for the council to investigate ways of increasing turnout in the county.
Councillor Hodgkinson said it was a critically important motion for democracy.
He said the new legislation was “just the latest step in this populist right wing government’s push to undermine democracy and entrench their position in power”
Councillor Hodgkinson also said there was only one person out of 47.5 million voters who was charged with impersonating another person in the 2019 general election.
“Since we know it’s not fraud that the Government is combating, we have to consider that it is something else,” he said.
“The emphasis and the goal is to stop some voters participating in our democracy.”
The motion had support from Labour and Green Party councillors but it was opposed by the Conservatives.
Conservative councillor Tim Harman, a former deputy returning officer and poll clerk at elections in Cheltenham, said there was a sensible case to be made for some kind of voter ID.
He also said that 33 of the 37 nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development require some form of identification.
Councillor Harman also said voters need ID to vote in countries which do not have right wing populist governments such as Canada, Spain, France and the Republic of Ireland.
“I’m not saying that we ever had mass problems of impersonation of voters in Cheltenham,” he said.
“But I can tell you as a presiding officer I was often in the uncomfortable position of being pretty certain that the person who pretended to be Fred Smith was not Mr Fred Smith but had no tool in the box to stop the person voting.
“We need to maintain the confidence of everybody that the process is fair and open and is not capable of manipulation.
“Voting is a right but there is also a responsibility that goes with it.”
The motion was defeated by 27 votes to 24.
