Like cornered cobras, Senate Democrats are spitting venom. They hope to kill the GOP House’s SAVE America Act. Proof of US citizenship for voter registration, photo ID at the polls, absentee-ballot limits, and clean voter rolls are the last things Democrats want in federal elections.
Meanwhile, Democrats’ comrades in Great Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, hope to sink their collective fangs into election integrity and poison the SAVE-like reforms that the Conservative Party enacted while in power.
Legendary Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli reputedly remarked: “A man who is not a Liberal at 16 has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at 60 has no head.”
Ironically, Disraeli’s 21st-Century philosophical opponents apparently excavated his 19th-Century observation as they drafted the Representation of the People Bill. Its very first proposal is the “Extension of right to vote etc to 16 and 17 year olds.” This provision does not ease vote fraud, per se. However, it confirms Labour’s belief that the U.K.’s most momentous decisions should be made by left-leaning children.
Britain’s Electoral Commission warmly describes Labour’s opening fusillade against clean elections. “The bill includes provisions to enable automatic or direct registration. Electoral registration officers would have a duty to register eligible voters using Council and other accurate data, without waiting for them [voters] to submit an application form.”
Rather than let citizens swim upstream if they choose to register, Labour wants to chase them around the English Channel with drift nets.
California and other Democratic states automatically register people to vote when they apply for drivers’ licenses and other government benefits. That’s how foreign citizens occasionally become ensnared in the voter rolls.
Some quickly demand removal to avoid any heat from ICE. Surely some foreign citizens have voted, naively reckoning that they should cast their unrequested mass mail-in ballots. Labour apparently observed such chaos and thought: Let’s try this at home!
Labour also wants to use mailing-address databases to register voters. Given how often people change residences, this is absurd.
Labour plans to abandon the requirement that Britons show photo ID to vote. Just as Washington’s Right tries to make this extremely popular ballot-security measure universal for federal elections, London’s Left sprints the other way.
In January 2024, then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government mandated photo ID at the polls. Consequently, the Electoral Commission found that “0.08% of people who tried to vote at a polling station in July 2024 were not able to because of the ID requirement.”
So, literally 99.92% of voters presented photo IDs and voted. As for the helpless 0.08%, Labour could FedEx them photo IDs. Instead, Labour wants to hand ballots to people with non-photo ID, including bank cards, prepaid cards, and even cards with surnames and only first initials (e.g., S. Jones or A. Patel).
About this, the Election Commission warns: “As bank cards do not include a photo and sometimes do not include a full name, polling station staff may not be able to verify that the person is who they say they are.” Perfect! What could go wrong?
Labour’s bill also would slap a £100,000 ($135,476) cap on political donations made by often right-leaning British subjects who reside overseas.
One such Englishman is fighting back. Cryptocurrency billionaire Ben Delo soon will return from Hong Kong, so he generously can support Reform UK, the party that he has buoyed with £4 million ($5,419,040) in donations.
“It seems that Labour intends to change the law, to make it harder for the opposition to win elections,” Delo wrote April 8 in The Telegraph. “I will move back to Britain early so I can contribute more to Reform’s budget.”
(President Donald J. Trump pardoned Delo in March 2025. He previously pleaded guilty to one count of keeping cryptocurrency customers’ records insufficient to satisfy U.S. regulations.)
While this idea lies outside Labour’s proposal, the Electoral Commission “previously recommended introducing ‘vouching’ or attestation at polling stations.” Thus, a registered voter could tell a poll worker: “Don’t worry, mate. Mustafa, Igor, Jorge, and Simon lack ID cards. But they’re splendid chaps. So, let’s get on with it and hand them their ballots.”
At best, this fosters electoral slovenliness. At worst, it turbocharges illegal-alien ballot-box stuffing.
“Labour are weakening protections brought in by the Conservatives to stop electoral fraud,” said Shadow Minister Paul Holmes MP, Tory spokesman for ballot integrity. “Law-abiding voters will rightly ask why, and wonder whether Labour are doing this to secure the votes of people with dubious legal status in our country.”
“Labour’s bill is an industrial-scale scandal waiting to happen: removing the photo ID requirement will destroy one of the few perfunctory safeguards we have in Britain and open the floodgates to criminal impersonation at the polls,” Oxford-based legal scholar Dr. Patrick Nash tells me. He lambasted Labour’s legislation between bites of curried beef at Cinnamon Club, the repurposed Westminster Public Library, now a temple of modern Indian cuisine.
“Worse,” Nash added, “it beggars belief that the Electoral Commission—the official regulator of electoral integrity—still exists, given that it routinely denies the existence of serious fraud and has even launched its own far-left campaign to introduce ‘vouching’ at the polls. The Government must scrap its voter ID vandalism immediately and shutter the Electoral Commission for being an incompetent, politicized bureaucracy. Americans will doubtless recognize the direct parallels between Labour’s moves and the Democrats’ cynical opposition to the SAVE Act.”
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