Well, Woking is in the news. It is going to be part of a pilot scheme at the forefront of the UK’s non-existent identity non-strategy to not introduce a working digital identity infrastructure to our great nation at any time in the foreseeable future The government has decided that voters in five areas in England will be asked to take identification to polling stations at local elections next year, and Woking is one of those areas. The report doesn’t mention just how the entitlement to vote is to be established but we already know what array of high technology machine learning AI super intelligent giant killer robot world brain quantum neuro-computing systems are to be deployed, because local authorities will be invited to apply to trial different types of identification, including forms of photo ID such as driving licences and passports, or formal correspondence such as a utilities bill.
Wait, what? It’s pointless enough showing a trivially counterfeitable physical identity document to someone who can’t verify it anyway, but come on… a utilities bill? That’s where we are in 2017 in the fifth richest country in the world? In Scott Corfe’s recent Social Market Foundation report A Verifiable Success—The future of identity in the UK he highlighted what he calls the "democratic opportunity" for electronic identity verification to facilitate internet voting thereby increasing civic engagement. Well, I agree. But that’s a long way from showing a gas bill to a polling station volunteer.
(And what does ‘local authorities will be invited to apply’ really mean anyway? They’ve already been ‘invited’ to adopt the national Gov.UK Verify identity service. Very few did, and fewer still continue, so five might be ambitious. And where they do, are we disenfranchising voters who don’t feel like forging documents if they don’t come from the mainstream demographic — a point also made in the SMF report — thus distorting the outcomes).
Now, I’ve written before that I am in favour of electronic voting of some kind but I’m very much against internet voting, because I think that in a functioning democracy voting must remain a public act and if it is allowed in certain remote conditions then we cannot be sure that a voter’s ballot is either secret or uncoerced. I think it is possible to imagine services where trusted third parties or electoral observers of some kind use mobile phones to go out and allow the infirm or otherwise housebound to vote, but that’s not the same thing as just allowing people to vote using mobile phones. I think internet voting is a really bad idea, but I take Scott's point about the need for digital identity. However, since we don’t have one and I don’t see any prospect of Government producing a robust one in the foreseeable future, we’re stuck with gas bills until someone gets to grip with issue.
(I should explain here for any baffled overseas readers of this blog that the United Kingdom has no national identification scheme or identity card or any other such symbol of continental tyranny, so our gold standard identity document is the gas bill. The gas bill is a uniquely trusted document, and the obvious choice for a government concerned about fraud. By the way, if for some reason you do not have a gas bill to attest to your suitability for some purpose or other, you can buy one here for theatrical or novelty use only.)
Why is it that the government never ask me about this sort of thing? Since they don’t have an identity infrastructure, why don’t they use other people’s? I would have thought that for a great majority of the population, especially the more transient and younger portion of the electorate (e.g., my sons) social media would provide a far better means to manage this entitlement.
I judge it to be far harder to forge a plausible Facebook profile than a plausible gas bill, so if I turn up at the polling station and log in to the Facebook profile for David Birch (if there is a Facebook profile for a David Birch, incidentally, I can assure you that it isn’t me) then they may as well let me vote.
None of this will make the slightest different to the central problem, of course, because the main source of electoral fraud in the UK is not personation at the polling station but fraudulently-completed postal ballots, a situation that led one British judge to call it “a system that would disgrace a banana republic”. Indeed, this is precisely what has been going on in my own dear Woking, where four people were jailed recently for electoral fraud. As far as I can understand it from reading the various reports, including the source reports on electoral fraud in the UK, the main problem is that postal votes are being completed by third parties, sometimes in bulk. No proof of identity is going to make any difference to this and so long as we allow people to continue voting by post I can’t see how the situation will improve. So: it is not beyond the wit of man to come up with alternatives to the postal vote. But that’s not what is being proposed. The UK government is not currently proposing an app or any other kind of electronic voting here, it is merely proposing to add a basic test of entitlement at the ballot box.
When this scheme was originally announced, the minister in charge of voting (Chris Skidmore) was quoted by the BBC as saying that “in many transactions you need a proof of ID” which is not, strictly speaking, true. In almost all transactions that we take part in on a daily basis we are not proving our identity, we are proving that we are authorised to do something whether it is to charge money to a line of credit in a shop, ride a bus or open the door to an office. In these cases we are using ID as a proxy because we don’t have a proper infrastructure in place for allowing us to keep our identities safely under lock and key while we go about our business.
If we are to implement the kind of electronic identity verification envisaged by the Social Market Foundation, then what you should really be presenting at the polling station is an anonymised entitlement to vote that you can authenticate your right to use. It is nobody at the polling station’s business who you are and, in common with many other circumstances, if you are required to present your identity to enable a transaction then we have created another place where identity can be stolen from. The real solution is, of course, not about using gas bills or indeed special-purpose election ID cards, but about introducing a general-purpose National Entitlement Scheme (NES). If memory serves, I think this is what my colleagues at Consult Hyperion and I first proposed in response to a government consultation paper on a national identity scheme a couple of decades ago. Oh well.
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