Improving Voter Registration in the UK

The challenge

The gaps in voter registration are well-documented. Over 8 million people are missing from the electoral register, and there are lower voter registration rates among young people, Black and Asian communities, voting-eligible migrants, and renters.

This has a clear impact on electoral outcomes and overall political representation for various communities. 

The inequities in our political system are exacerbated by the voter registration process, which puts up unnecessary stumbling blocks – especially for new voters, people who change addresses frequently (e.g. carers or renters), anyone facing language barriers, and migrants who may not be aware of their UK voting rights.

Big wins

• We designed a pilot contact and peer to peer support programme to get people registered who otherwise may not have. 45,917 texts and 656 phone calls were made to support people in the lead up to polling day, while collecting information on their biggest pain points in the registration process
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• An estimated 10k+ voters registered in the run up to the 2024 General Election, 62% people reached were registering for the first time, 56% were commonwealth citizens

• Our Constituency Lookup Tool was exclusively covered by The Guardian.

The campaign so far:

Just Register is a national campaign, launched by Small Axe, to address some of the barriers to voter registration. This is how we're going about it:

1. Increase civil society capacity
   We launched two new tools - Just Register and Can I Vote to supercharge voter registration drives, close the migrant voting gap and assist more people to overcome barriers to registration.
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2. Provide direct support to voters
   We sent email reminders, texts and made calls to people who signed up through our online tools, assisting them through the registration process and clarifying requirements for voting. We also collected key data on existing barriers to registration
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3. Educate to change policy
   ‍We made a constituency look up tool in collaboration with C6 Digital to show the disparities in representation between constituencies, sparking conversation and motivating people to register to vote.
   
   Accompanying research covered in The Guardian shed new light on the relationship between registration, representation and constituency boundaries.

Just Register Tool & Assisted Voter Registration

People sign up on Just Register for more information about voter registration, and then receive updates, reminders and prompts via email, peer-to-peer texts and phone calls.

Another way into the assisted voter registration programme was through the Can I Vote tool - a quick and easy way for non British citizens to check which elections they are eligible to vote in. Many migrant communities don’t know they have voting rights in the UK.

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We engage in ongoing conversations with participants, helping them through any stumbling blocks while gathering more information about how people interact with the gov.uk form, whether they go on to register, and the barriers they face.  

We ran a pilot programme during the 2024 General Election. Largely aimed at Commonwealth citizens, young people and first-time voters. With the support of a team of 23 volunteers we sent over 45,000 text messages and made over 650 calls, resulting in more than 10,000 people registering. More than half of them registered to vote for the first time.

Our approach was subsequently adopted by the National Union of Students and the Labour Party in the lead up to the voter registration deadline.

Over the course of the programme, we heard countless stories of people who were motivated to participate in the 2024 election, and who faced challenges getting onto the electoral roll.

Again and again, we found a demonstration of a powerful principle: increasing accessibility for any group often helps others as well. 

Whether the barriers to voting are about documentation, information, time, access needs or something else entirely — there are many people in this country who could benefit from a helping hand and a flexible and personal approach.

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