Plans to force people to show photo ID to take part in UK elections amount to Republican-style voter suppression and are likely to erode faith in the democratic process rather than reinforce it, three leading US civil rights groups have warned.
In an intervention that could prove embarrassing to ministers, US groups that were at the frontline of efforts to combat vote-blocking efforts by Donald #Trump and his allies, said ID laws disproportionately affected people from poorer and more marginalised communities.
Boris Johnson’s Tory government is due to introduce a bill in the spring to make photo ID mandatory from 2023 for all UK-wide and English elections following two years of small-scale trials, despite repeated warnings from charities and others about its impact on groups less likely to possess the necessary documents.
“The real reason these laws are passed is to suppress the vote, and that is in fact what happens,” Caren Short, senior staff attorney with the SPLC, told the Guardian.
“There are certain communities that do not possess the required ID, or the underlying documents required to get the ID, and so it makes it harder for those folks to vote. That is what these laws are designed to do, and that is in fact what they do.”
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