The hereditary Johnson
May 10, 2021•282 words
So the UK government is going to require photo ID to vote to 'combat fraud'. In the 2019 general election 164 cases of fraud were reported. 47,587,254 people voted so this is a report rate of 0.0003%. There was a single conviction related to the general election, which gives a conviction rate of two millionths of one percent. Electoral fraud is a non-problem in the UK:
There remains no evidence of large-scale electoral fraud in 2019.
So the UK, government is lying to us, yet again again: photo ID is not, in fact required to combat electoral fraud because the rate of electoral fraud is minute. So that's not why they want people to have to show photo ID: why, I wonder, would they require it? Well, I have two forms o photo ID: a passport and a driving license. So the sort of people who will not have photo ID are the sort of people who don't have these things: poor people, young people, people in abusive relationships, people from ethnic minority groups and other marginalised people.
The reason the government wants to require photo ID to vote is to stop these people from voting.
There's a term for this strategy that anyone who has followed US politics knows: this is voter suppression. This proposal is a direct attempt by the government of the UK to suppress voting by groups they find inconvenient and thus to further impair democracy in the UK. It it another step in the process of moving the UK towards being a one-party state ruled, I expect, by the hereditary Johnson or one of his uncountable offspring.
Resistance to this is necessary.