The free voter ID scheme is a proven failure, campaigners from Unlock Democracy say, as new figures show a dire take-up on applications to the scheme just before the local elections.
Official figures show fewer than 3% of voters deterred from voting at the 2024 general election by voter ID laws have applied under the government scheme.
Voter ID applications: bottomed out for the local elections
Survey data from immediately after the 2024 general election found 4% of those who did not vote (approximately 777,000 potential voters) cited voter ID rules as the reason. But by the deadline on Wednesday 23 April, the number of applications for a Voter Authority Certificate (VAC) since the general election had barely surpassed 20,000.
Indeed, since the free ID scheme was launched in January 2023, only 234,000 applications have been made.
Compared with the local elections in 2023 and 2024, numbers for voter ID applications are also way down.
Since 1 March 2025, on average 170 VAC applications have been made each day, compared to almost 650 in the same period last year and over 1,100 in the run-up to the 2023 local elections, the first elections at which the scheme was in place.
Tom Brake, director of Unlock Democracy, commented:
The free voter ID scheme has utterly failed. More than two years after it was launched, most of the people who need ID still don’t have one.
What’s so frustrating is how unnecessary this all is. As Angela Rayner has acknowledged, cases of voter fraud – the problem which voter ID is supposed to address – are few and far between.
Out of 58 million votes cast across three elections in 2019, there were only 33 allegations of the type of voter fraud that the voter ID rules could have prevented, with just 1 resulting in a conviction
“The VAC is a failed solution to a problem of politicians’ own making” said Brake.
What a mess
Polling released this week showed 46% of people were unaware that they could apply for a free voter ID. This despite the Electoral Commission investing significant sums in awareness-raising activities in the run-up to elections.
For Brake, a government that has committed itself to “encouraging participation” in UK democracy can no longer afford to sit back and watch while thousands of eligible voters continue to be prevented from voting due to voter ID restrictions.
Brake added:
Even with some form of mandatory ID card, voter ID rules will always end up reducing the number of eligible voters able to cast their ballot. The question for politicians is, ‘are they comfortable with that?’
People talk about voting being a habit, but so is not voting. If the government is not careful, voter ID laws will entrench patterns of non-voting among those – disproportionately the more marginalised in our country – without an accepted form of ID. It’s time to pull the plug on this unnecessary and costly voter ID experiment.
It is estimated the policy will cost between £120m and £180m over a decade to implement. Yet all it is doing is disenfranchising people even more from democracy – which is maybe the point.
Featured image via the Canary
