Undergraduate students at Aberystwyth university. Campaigners fear that a ‘whole generation’ of young people will be locked out of voting in the EU referendum.
At least four million young people aged between 18 and 24 face being locked out of voting in the EU referendum because they are not on the electoral register.
Last night the head of Labour’s campaign to keep the United Kingdom in the EU, former home secretary Alan Johnson, said he was concerned that “a whole generation” could be excluded.
The issue of missing young voters – made worse by changes to the registration system introduced by the government last year – is a particular problem for those campaigning for the UK to stay in, because this age group is far more positive about membership than older generations.
The In campaign will officially launch its campaign tomorrow and will put National Union of Students’ president Megan Dunn on its board in an attempt to promote interest among young voters.
Johnson said that pro-EU campaigners now needed to step up efforts to get young people to register as voters under the new system of “individual electoral registration” (IER). “Unless we do more about this, a whole generation will be left off,” he said.
Another board member, former TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, said it was crucial to energise student and other young voters to turn out.
Previously, universities and colleges enrolled all their students automatically, and an adult could register anyone of voting age in the household, as well as those aged 17 who would reach voting age within a year.
But the government changed the rules so that everyone has to sign up individually and produce a national insurance number.
The fall-off in young people registered and those aged 17 has been particularly dramatic. Electoral commission figures show that 30% (around 2.9m) of people aged 18 to 24 are not on the register, compared with 16% of the population as a whole. In addition, 1.9 million more people – many of whom are believed to be young – will be added to that total if they fail to register by the end of the year. Most strikingly, there has been a 47% reduction since last year in the number of 17-year-olds who are registered in the system.
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Investigations by the organisation Hope not Hate, which is promoting more involvement in the democratic process by young people and will launch a voter registration drive next month, suggest that well over four million young people may not be on the register when the referendum happens, probably in September next year.
Nick Lowles, its director, said: “A combination of those not being on the register in the first place, young people dropping off in December, students not registering and the appalling decline in 17-year-olds joining the register will make the job of the In campaign even harder in the runup to the referendum.
“Young people are a key constituency for the pro-European campaign. They are generally more positive about Europe, more relaxed about immigration and living in a multicultural society and more optimistic. But with hundreds of thousands of young people dropping off the register this autumn to add to the three million already off, the In campaign is going to be at a disadvantage.
“The problem is that once you’ve dropped off the register, it is so much harder for parties and campaign groups to find and re-register you. The In and Leave campaigns will be given copies of the electoral register with names of everyone enrolled. What they won’t be given is the names and addresses of the 1.9 million who might be dropping off in December and the millions of others who are already not on the register.”
Recent polling by YouGov found a strong correlation between attitudes to EU membership and age. The under-25 age groups favour staying in against leaving by 64% to 23%, while over-60s back leaving by 52% to 43%.
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