 Recently, the Tories revealed their immigrant bashing, dementia taxing, uncosted manifesto. Among these policies was a plan to introduce voter ID, so that means forcing people to show identification when they vote. Their reasoning? Vote a fraud. But the stats don't support that. The government's own report found that of the 51.4 million votes cast in 2015, there were only 130 allegations of fraud. That's 0.00025% of votes. Now that report lies on anecdotes and self-reporting, but even taking that into account, it's pretty hard to argue that voter fraud isn't anyway a significant issue in this country. Why do the Tories want to introduce a voter ID law? Well, it might have something to do with the fact that, according to the Electoral Commission, under these proposed rules, an estimated 3.5 million people won't have an acceptable piece of photo ID. That means if things stayed as they were, 7.5% of the electorate wouldn't be able to vote. What this is going to do is make it much harder for marginalised groups to vote. Just look at Northern Ireland. They require voter ID, but when the process was trialled, they found poorer people were less likely to have the necessary identification. So free voter ID cards were introduced, but the Tories don't have any plans to do that in the rest of the UK. Even if they did, the evidence suggests if free voter ID is offered, there are hidden costs like needing to have the right documentation, which because ACT is an obstacle for people on low incomes. That's people who are generally more likely to vote Labour. There are plenty of reasons why people don't vote, but voter ID won't help the situation. What we should be doing is engaging people in the democratic process, not making it more difficult for them to do so. The Tories will claim this is about making democracy more secure, but that simply isn't true. It's an attempt to make it work better for them.