Clause 6 - Offences
Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Bill
5:30 pm
Mr Des Browne (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Northern Ireland Office; Kilmarnock and Loudoun, Labour)
As I made clear in my intervention on the hon. Member for Reigate, the purpose of the Bill is to protect the legitimate rights of voters in Northern Ireland from abuse. The purpose of preventing abuse in elections is to ensure that the result is a true reflection of the will of the voters who exercised their legitimate right. It was never my intention to remove any rights from voters in Northern Ireland. It is with great reluctance that we require legitimate voters there to produce identification or to satisfy other conditions in order to exercise those legitimate rights. I have no intention of allowing the Bill to become a vehicle to remove rights from the voters of Northern Ireland that are enjoyed by voters in the rest of the United Kingdom.
That is my position on multiple registration and the law as it presently stands. If the Committee wishes, I am prepared to say what the law is and how it came to be like that, but I am not sure that that would help. The hon. Member for Belfast, East has broadly summarised, if not entirely accurately, the history of the law. The point of principle is whether, in protecting people's rights, we should take other rights from them. My view is that we should not.