Professor Iain McLean and the scandal of IER

A 1992 paper by Professor Iain McLean and Dr Jeremy P. Smith (University of Warwick)was recently referred to in a New Statesman article(6 October)entitled The biggest political scandal youve never heard of.

The New Statesman article was commenting on the coalition governments proposed plans to move to away from an electoral system based on registered households, and towards a system of individual electoral registration (IER). The article quotes the Electoral Commission calling it the biggest change to voting since the start of universal suffrage in 1928, and saying that an astonishing ten million or more voters could just fall off the register.

Iain and Jeremys paper, called The UK poll tax and the declining electoral roll: unintended consequences?, was used by the article as an example of how Conservative government policy has previously diminished the turnout at election time. It quotes Iain and Jeremys paper as saying that the introduction of the poll tax in April 1990 accounted for slightly more than one-third of the estimated one million people shortfall between the electoral register and the [official] estimate of the qualified population, and that this shortfall - of poorer, urban, Labour-leaning voters - cost Neil Kinnock the 1992 general election.

The full New Statesman article can be read here.

Iain and Jeremys paper can be found here.