Say NO to the Elections Bill

The campaign

The Electoral Commission (EC) is the UK’s elections’ watchdog. It oversees our elections to ensure that they are free and fair. We believe that the Electoral Commission should have more power to do its job and its independence must be safeguarded.

In September 2020, we launched our campaign ‘Hands off the Electoral Commission’ after Conservative Chair, Amanda Milling, called for the Electoral Commission to be ‘reformed’ or abolished.

This campaign merged into our campaign against the Government’s ‘Electoral Integrity Bill’ which was announced in February 2021. The Bill was later renamed the ‘Elections Bill’, as the previous name was already used by the Republicans in Georgia for their controversial voter suppression bill!

We campaigned fiercely against the Bill because it introduced many changes that are damaging to our democracy. The Bill was a clear attempt by the Government to change election laws which increased the chances of its own re-election.

The Bill neuters the independent elections’ watchdog by allowing the government to issue a strategy and policy statement for the EC. The Bill also introduced the requirement for voters to show photo ID at polling stations, making it harder for millions of people to exercise their democratic right to vote.

Our supporters fully backed our campaign. In a survey, 95% of our supporters stated that they were ‘very concerned’ about the Government’s plans for major changes to the Electoral Commission.

Our aim was to get the Government to pause and rethink the Elections Bill.

What did we deliver?

We launched a petition calling on the Government to pause and rethink the Bill. This became our biggest petition ever, receiving over 66,000 signatures. We delivered the petition to Lord True’s office.

We created the ‘Elections Bill Action Centre’ on our website which our supporters used to join the fight against the Elections Bill. Over seven hundred of our supporters wrote to their MP about their concerns with the Elections Bill, and over six hundred of our supporters submitted letters to their local newspapers calling for the Elections Bill to be scrapped.

We took part in weekly meetings with a wide coalition of organisations fighting to get changes to the Bill. This became known as the ‘Democracy Defence Coalition’ and included us, the Electoral Reform Society, Open Britain, Fair Vote and others.

We ran a social media advertising campaign to raise the profile of the Government’s dangerous plans for our elections. We specifically targeted the constituencies of potential Conservative rebels. Nearly a million people saw our Facebook ads and we received thousands of comments from people concerned about the Bill.

We wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons, asking him to ensure that the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission, which oversees the operations of the Electoral Commission, does not have a majority of Conservative MPs. We met with the Speaker’s clerk on the same subject.  We await the Speaker’s response.

We submitted evidence to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee’s (PACAC) inquiry into the Elections Bill. Their report echoed many of our objections to the bill, like concerns around the effect of photo ID on turnout and attacks on the independence of the Electoral Commission.

We spent time persuading MPs to vote against the Elections Bill. We helped brief the Labour parliamentary party on the Elections Bill, and we wrote to Conservative MPs throughout the campaign. We wrote to them to explain the threat to the independence of the Electoral Commission. We also shared with them an article from Conservative Peer, Lord Willetts, about his concerns regarding mandatory photo ID at elections.

We hosted the ‘Elections Bill Summit’ for our supporters and members. Our guest speaker was Cat Smith MP, the Shadow Secretary of State for Democracy, who gave us a helpful update of the bill's progress through parliament. We also heard from our friends at the Electoral Reform Society, Voice4change and ShoutOutUK who spoke about the impact of the bill and what we can do about it.

We teamed up with ShoutOutUK to create a series of videos and infographics about the Elections Bill. These shone a light on the dubious claims the government made to justify introducing photo ID at elections. This content received almost a million impressions on social media.

We attended the ‘Say NO to the Elections Bill’ rally at Parliament Square. Our supporters came along and heard speeches from Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs, as well as the leader of Reform UK and the co-leader of the Green Party and our Director, Tom Brake.

We hired a poster van to drive around Westminster displaying a message calling for the Elections Bill to be scrapped. This stunt grabbed the attention of some MPs and Peers who came to speak to us about the Elections Bill and its impact on our democracy.

Campaigning in the House of Lords

We dedicated lots of time to persuading Peers in the House of Lords to defeat the Government’s plans. 

We wrote the first of three Lords briefings which were circulated to all Peers to explain the damage that the Elections Bill will do to our democracy. 

We contacted key peers to urge them to attend the debate and stand up against the dangerous parts of the bill. We also got one thousand of our supporters to write to crossbench Peers to express their concerns about the Elections Bill.

We won some major victories in the House of Lords. The Lords defeated the Government’s plans to neuter the Electoral Commission and introduce mandatory photo ID for elections. Unfortunately, those parts of the Bill were reinstated in the Commons and then passed through the Lords.

A handful of concessions from the Government were secured. For example, the Government agreed to scrap Clause 28 of the Bill. The clause related to joint campaigning by registered parties and third parties and would have caused problems for the Labour Party.

The Government also accepted a new clause in the Bill which requires post-legislative scrutiny of the Act. This means the Secretary of State must publish a review of the effectiveness of this legislation in three to five years.

The Bill is now an Act of Parliament.

What’s next?

Going forward, we will campaign for the Government to scrap Voter ID before the General Election. You can read more about that campaign here.

We will also be keeping an eye on the membership of the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission and will press the Speaker to avoid making it a Conservative-dominated committee.

We hope to persuade the Labour Party, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats and the other opposition parties to commit to repealing the dangerous parts of the Elections Bill if they come to power at the next General Election.