Proven cases of electoral fraud are small. There would appear to be little to no evidence that it is a problem in the UK. I would suspect that if it does occur it is more likely to do so in local elections but, like the government, i do not have any evidence to support that suspicion.

Of course it was a Labour government that floated this idea before. Indeed they introduced it in Northern Ireland in 2002. I don't know how people over there have taken to it. I am not aware that it is a major issue.

BUT.

The following text is taken from Channel 4 website.

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In Northern Ireland, voters who didn’t have the right documents could apply for a free photographic electoral ID card from their local council.

This went some way to answering the objection that people who could not afford the application fee for a driving licence or passport might be priced out of voting.

When the government first announced this bill in the Queen’s Speech in 2019, it explicitly said it would follow the Northern Ireland model, saying: “Any voter who does not have an approved form of ID will be able to apply, free of charge, for a local electoral identity document.”

This assurance is missing from the notes that accompany the 2021 Queen’s Speech, and we haven’t been able to pin the government down on whether they still plan to offer free ID cards to people who don’t have them.

On the question of funding, a government spokesman simply told us: “We will set out detail in due course.”

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The devil is in the detail. If people have to pay for voter id, it will hit the poorest hardest. They are probably more likely to vote labour rather than tory.

If the government try to push this through before the next general election, i think that even the less cynical among us will suspect their motives for doing so.