Portsmouth council leader to write to Prime Minister over new voter ID rules which saw dozens of people turned away from the polling stations

Councillor Steve Pitt, at the request of members of the council’s Lib Dem cabinet on Tuesday (July 25), agreed to send a letter to Rishi Sunak during discussion of a report reviewing this year’s elections. Councillors said the requirement, introduced to tackle voter fraud, was ‘like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut,’ due to the low number of people prosecuted for the issue.

Dozens of people in Portsmouth were recorded as having not voted because they arrived at a polling station without ID, but councillors said they believed the figure was much higher. Of the 223 people who were refused a ballot paper for not meeting the requirement, 99 did not returning to vote afterwards. And with turnout 1.6 per cent down on the previous year councillors said they believed many others were put off entirely.

• More than 200 people turned away from polling stations

• Most deprived ward hit the hardest by new photo ID voting rules

“If anyone is eligible to vote they should be able to vote,” councillor Matthew Winnington said. “If they’re stopped from voting that’s voter suppression.

“Ninety-nine people in our city didn’t vote because they didn’t have the right ID but we [councillors] know anecdotally that people told us that they were not going out to vote because they didn’t have ID.

“This is an indictment of government policy and a government more interested in petty political games than governing this country properly.”

Labour councillor Graham Heaney said the requirement outweighed the scale of the issue of voter fraud.

“It seems we have used a sledgehammer to crack a nut and it’s had a detrimental impact,” he added.

Councillor Gerald Vernon-Jackson, who was the council’s leader at the time of the elections, said the range of acceptable forms of ID was “ludicrous” with neither dockyard nor NHS workers allowed to use their work ID. He proposed that Cllr Pitt write to the prime minister to outline the council’s concerns and this suggestion was unanimously supported by the cabinet.