The government today announced that it was scrapping the implementation of the Co-ordinated Online Record of Electors.
CORE would have standardised local electoral registers to make them fully interoperable, with a new set of data standards covering the storage of the voter's key details.
It had been a long-running saga, with £2.78m spent on it up to October 2008, but it was put on hold in 2009 when the plans for individual voter registration were first set out and data requirements for the register had to be re-examined.
The aim of CORE was to allow automated look-ups (by approved organisations) of whether a voter was on the electoral register – something for which the primary beneficiary would have been political parties which have to check that every donation comes from someone on the register.
Ministers said that at an estimated £11.4m to build and £2.7m a year to run, the costs were greater than the potential benefits.
Status quo
From the tone of the press release, the government seems to be subtly seeking public support for an anti-politics move, indicating that the money will not be spent on something mainly of use to politicians.
Personally I think it unwise to neglect our democratic infrastructure.
And the other main point about the move is that rather than opening up the political system which might help to address any feelings of hostility to political parties, it reinforces the status quo by making it harder to comply with the rules on accepting and declaring donations.
Only the more established parties have the resources and mechanisms to comply with the existing requirements.
I wrote previously about how One Click Orgs could be used to challenge existing political parties, but if the infrastructure isn't available to support them then that will not be a possibility.
The possibility for simple online donations to microparties, with automated checks against the CORE database has now vanished. I think that is a huge loss.
Rolling back the state?
I could also point to some further government inconsistency.
Scrapping CORE, constitutional reform minister Mark Harper said:
"Continuing with plans to create CORE would be at odds with the government's commitment to rolling back the state and ensuring we are always getting value for money for the taxpayer. It is therefore right that CORE should be abandoned."
Yet last month the government published its proposals for individual electoral registration (IER), adding a host of new data collection requirements for people wanting to be included on the register:
- Date of birth.
- National Insurance number – where possible.
- Immigration status – if non-British or non-EU Commonwealth citizen.
- Declaration as to whether they are/have been registered elsewhere in the last 12 months.
- Previous address where registered in the last 12 months (currently requested but not mandatory).
So the government is not actually "rolling back the state" when it comes to electoral registration at all – it is expanding it, and with perfectly good reason.
Added to that, the privacy impact assessment for individual electoral registration makes clear that it is possible to have data management policies which mitigate the risks of sensible data collection and sharing.
So if it can be done with IER, it seems disingenuous to say it cannot be done with CORE.
A blow against eDemocracy
The possibility of having online look-ups to the electoral register could also have been put to other uses.
For example, Number 10 had clearly hoped to link its new ePetitions system to the electoral register but had to abandon that as there was no verification mechanism.
Yet despite scrapping CORE, the government will (last I heard) still have to spend money verifying random samples of UK signatories to petitions organised under the European Citizens' Initiative. So the savings suggested by the Cabinet Office are not as clear-cut as they may seem anyway.
Finally, its also worth adding that most experts seem agreed that any future roll-out of eVoting was dependent on CORE going ahead, so that possibility has also been killed for the foreseeable future.
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