No10 argues only 0.4% of people in the 2019 voter ID pilots were turned away and didn’t come back.

Extrapolated crudely across the country, that’s more than 127,000 people losing their vote.

And that’s not counting the people who didn’t turn up at all because they had no ID.

Let’s compare that to the scale of the issue. This is a graph of the number of total votes, vs the number of *allegations* of in-person voter fraud which would have been prevented by these measures.

Moreover, the current system has insanely high levels of public confidence - between 85 and 90% for in-person voting, depending on the year.

Since there’s neither evidence nor public opinion backing up the government’s plan to change the rules, it must be for other reasons.

Here’s the evaluation of the 2019 pilot schemes. TLDR, most of the data isn’t that useful. The only significant, measurable outcome of demanding ID is that lots of people who wanted to vote were turned away and didn’t come back.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/819404/2019_Voter_ID_Pilots_Evaluation.pdf