Online Voter Registration Popular in U.K.

Article May 7, 2015 Read time:

Projects: Election Initiatives

The availability of online voter registration is spreading in the United States, and recent data from across the pond show that it is immensely popular in the United Kingdom.

The country’s online system rolled out in June 2014, and since then, more than 7.1 million people have used it, compared with 2.1 million who selected paper forms during the same period. As of December 2014, the U.K. had approximately 41.7 million registered voters. On April 19, the deadline to register to vote for today’s nationwide general election, a record-breaking 469,047 applicants employed the system, compared with 15,965 who opted for paper.

The U.K. Electoral Commission stated that the online system had received nearly 2.3 million applications since the March 16 start of a campaign to encourage people to register to vote, which pointed applicants to the Web-based portal. The commission undertook the public outreach effort after a recent survey found that 40 percent of respondents did not know they could apply online.