Voter ID

Which elections use voter ID?

Voters need to show photo ID before being issued a ballot paper in polling stations at UK Parliament elections and at local elections in England, including parish and mayoral, and local referendums. Voters in polling stations at police and crime commissioner elections in England and Wales  also require photo ID.

The voter ID provisions for Great Britain were introduced by the Elections Act 2022. They also apply to a proxy voter, someone voting in person on someone else’s behalf.

Voters in Northern Ireland have been required to show a form of ID when voting in all elections in Northern Ireland since 1985, and photo ID since 2003.

Voter ID requirements to do not apply to devolved elections in Scotland and Wales. Devolved elections are those to the Scottish Parliament and Senedd Cymru and local elections in Scotland and Wales.

What ID can you use?

Voters can use passports, full and provisional driving licences, Proof of Age Standards Scheme (PASS) cards, Blue badges, and some concessionary travel cards. The full list is available on the Electoral Commission website: Accepted forms of photo ID.

People without an existing acceptable form of voter ID can apply online or by post for a free Voter Authority Certificate (VAC). The VAC will display the name and a passport style photo of a voter.

The ID used in a polling station must be original, not a photo on someone’s phone or a photocopy. The only current exception is if a voter uses an eVisa.

It does not matter if a document has expired, as long as the photo is a good likeness.

Voters may request their ID is inspected in private.

How much personation is there?

Critics of voter ID say the problem it is designed to solve, personation, is very rare. Personation is the electoral crime of pretending to be someone else to use their vote.

Only a handful of alleged cases have been reported in the last five years and only there have been two convictions and two cautions. These were in 2021.

Public perception of fraud does not generally come from first-hand experience of electoral fraud. The Electoral Commission research (pdf) has found that the public were mainly getting their information about electoral fraud from media reports and second-hand information. For some, being provided with information on electoral fraud can heighten the concern of it and there was some assumption from participants that the topic would not be brought to attention unless it existed as an issue. Further research (pdf) by the commission found that providing information on electoral processes helped to reduce concerns.

Impact of voter ID

The Electoral Commission has reviewed the operation of voter ID so far. It has found the implementation of voter ID has been well-managed and elections have been well-run.

Changes in turnout cannot be attributed to a single factor but in 2024 the commission’s survey research found around 4% of people who didn’t vote at said this was because of the voter ID requirement.

Awareness of voter ID has been high and the number of people unable to vote has been low.

At the 2024 general election at least 0.25% of electors were turned away from polling stations, around 50,000 people. Two-thirds (34,000) did return with acceptable ID and were issued with a ballot paper. This meant 16,000 did not return. This is equivalent of 0.08% of all polling station voters. This is an underestimate as 20 constituencies in Great Britain did not provide data and in the elections held so far some returning officers employed ‘greeters’ outside polling stations. This was to remind voters of the need to bring voter ID.

At the 2023 local elections in England, at least 0.7% of voters were turned away initially. Most people did come back after being turned away (63%), but some did not (37%). This means at least 0.25% of all people who tried to vote in person (or around 14,000 people) did not get a ballot paper.

Both the Electoral Commission and the government commissioned research note that the proportion of voters turned away has declined with each of the  three elections so far, but both noted the data needed to be treated with some caution.

These figures are likely to be an underestimate because of the way the data was collected. In 2023 local elections and the 2024 general elections

Awareness of Voter Authority Certificates is low. This is partly because most people have access to photo ID and are unlikely to need a VAC. However, government commissioned research has found that this could also be because messaging of the availability of VACs may have got lost in the public awareness messages about voter ID more generally.

The commission has consistently found that some were more likely to have problems in meeting the ID requirement, particularly those “renting from a social landlord, the unemployed, lower social grades, and disabled people”.

Recommendations for changes

The commission and others have recommended measures to ensure voters who are entitled to vote can do so. These include that the list of acceptable voter ID be reviewed, that a form of ‘vouching’ be introduced, where a registered voter can attest that someone without voter ID is who they say they are, and the deadlines, design and applications for VACs be reviewed.

Although the Labour Party opposed the introduction of voter ID, along with most opposition parties in the previous Parliament, it has not pledged to scrap the requirements. Instead, it has committed to reviewing how voter ID works and is also considering the Electoral Commission’s recommendations.

In February 2025 the government responded to the Electoral Commission’s recommendations:

Conclusions from the government’s review of the voter identification policy, including outcomes of the above considerations, will be brought out in the government’s Strategy for Elections, to be published later this year