New Clause 14
Political Parties and Elections Bill
7:00 pm
Eleanor Laing (Shadow Minister, Justice; Epping Forest, Conservative)
The new clauses propose a moratorium on a review of electoral modernisation pilots. The point is that it is wrong for the Government to continue to bring forward gimmicks to try to encourage people to register, to vote and take part in the democratic process. Gimmicks are wrong. Those who are looking at electoral reform need time to consider the sort of matters that we dealt with in the last group of amendments. That is why we have proposed a moratorium on electoral modernisation pilots and review of them.
One need look no further than last year’s Gould review of the Scottish elections, which came up with so many criticisms of the system that was piloting electronic voting and counting. For the sake of time, I will give just one example. In Airdrie and Shotts, Labour’s majority of 1,446 was less than the 1,536 rejected ballots under a very complicated system. Our electoral and voting systems must be simple, straightforward, and understood by every member of the electorate and all the candidates. It is wrong to mess about with gimmicks, saying that they are to modernise the system. The system does not need to be modernised in that way. It needs to be reformed in the way we have discussed.