#VoteWatch24: The Only Person Who Can Safeguard Our Democracy – You

Peter Jukes looks at what we can do about the importation of US-style 'voter suppression' to the UK with local elections imminent and a General Election looming

Ever since 2016 when both the personnel and strategies employed in the EU Referendum were closely followed by Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign (cf. Steve Bannon) there has been an influx of US dark money into the UK, especially through opaquely funded think tanks, and with that the arrival of ‘voter suppression’ tactics which have taken root in the US over decades.

The clearest example of this is the new photo ID requirement for voting in local and national elections in the UK. Byline Times - particularly through the work of our Chief Reporter Josiah Mortimer - has been investigating this for years. The requirement hits lower-income voters who are less likely to have driver’s licenses or passports and adds a further deterrence to the millions who are already missing from the Electoral Register.

Photo ID is particularly targeted at the young who, as Armando Iannucci noticed last week, have minimal options for accepted Voter ID, while those in the 60s have more options.

Armando Iannucci: Back of my Polling Card for local elections. For 1st time, photo ID is required. Card gives many options for elderly or those with disability. None, NONE, for younger or student voters. The policy is simply biased against younger voters, designed to suppress their vote.

Photo ID was billed as an anti-dote to in-person fraud during elections. But this is a non-existent problem, with only one conviction in 2019. Meanwhile, our analysis of previous elections has shown that the Photo ID requirement, and lack of information about it, deterred thousands of voters in previous elections.

Looking at the demographics of current opinion polling, there is very little doubt that the Conservative Government thinks that this will suppress what is to them, currently an unfavourable youth vote.

In 2024, the political party that 18 to 24 year-old's in Great Britain would be most likely to vote for was the Labour Party, at 68 percent, while among those over 65, the Conservative Party was the most popular with 33 percent intending to vote for them.

Except for a brief moment with Shirley Porter and Westminster housing in the 1980s, I have not witnessed this kind of cynical self-interested manipulation of the democratic vote before in the UK. Certainly not on this scale. The former Minister leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, went on to admit so much last year when he called the measures “gerrymandering”.

Photo ID is just one example. The Conservatives have just nearly doubled the amount that can be spent on election campaigns, while allowing massive donations from abroad and barely incorporated companies. They have opened up voting to millions who have lived overseas for more than 15 years with little oversight and deliberately clipped the wings of the Electoral Commission watchdog which is supposed to regulate these matters. All in all, the last five years have seen a concerted multi-pronged attack on our democratic rights and a cynical attempt at disenfranchisement.

But what can we do about it?

Fighting Back - Exposing the Dirty Tricks

The simplest way for anyone to combat the suppressive effect of Photo ID is to register for one here but time is running out for the looming Mayoral and local elections on 2 May. And registration will do nothing to stop the millions now being poured into electioneering given the near doubling in spending limits.

And that’s just the official sums. Insiders from the world of think tanks, PR companies and hedge funds have often spoken to me (sadly off the record) about the volume of ‘off the books’ money spent on election campaigns by wealthy individuals or companies lobbying for contracts. A lot of this spending goes on underneath the radar, especially in astroturfed ‘grassroots’ campaigns that spend millions on social media — especially Facebook.

But we shouldn’t be deterred, and here’s something you can do to limit the damage of dark money, much of it foreign, in our elections. You can help our #VoteWatch24 campaign by keeping an eye on the various dirty tricks and evasive tactics which are becoming apparent.

Our Political Editor Adam Bienkov has already detailed how the Conservative candidate for London Mayor has been plastering the Capital with leaflets falsely claiming voters are about to be hit by a new charge to drive their cars.

Of course, this is just a continuation of the Vote Leave tactics pioneered by Dominic Cummings eight years ago, in an abject lie still considered a success because it becomes a talking point.

As well as being false, it combines the familiar deception of not making the candidate or party clear, with the more modern and insidious data harvesting through the QR code.

We saw some of this deception in previous local elections. Byline Times readers passed on hundreds of leaflets in which Conservative candidates didn’t name their party, or appeared in the colours of the Green Party. We also saw dozens of fake local newspapers, purporting to be covering local news, when they were, in fact, party campaign propaganda.

It’s like an arms race, each time we catch them out, they change their tactics and devise new dark electioneering arts. The newest ruse it appears, like the QR code above, is to use polls and other questionnaires to harvest the email addresses and IDs of voters.

Combined with the powerful new analytic and campaign software available, this allows parties to target individuals - sometimes to ‘get out the voter’ or register them, sometimes for quite the reverse, to feed false information about voting or the policies of parties and effectively suppress the vote.

So we’re asking your help to keep track of this. If you spot anything that bears investigation, email us Votewatch24@bylinetimes.com.

If you don’t want to volunteer, you can still help out by supporting us in organising other volunteers and commissioning local and freelance journalists to follow up on all the leads.

This is not about party politics, but something bigger than that. At the moment, it’s the Conservative Party that has both the money and the imperative (given the dire state of their standing in opinion polls) to bend and break the rules. But the precedent they set could well be followed by any political party, and Labour at the moment seems to have no imperative to overturn some of the more repressive legislation.

Only you can stop this.