BME voting/registering

Hello,

Please note that I will be out of the office on Friday 5 and Mon 8 Aug, and will not be monitoring my emails during this time. In my absence please contact Stephanie Payne 0207 721 0653.

Regards, Janice
Interim Information Manager

Dear Mr Martin,

Thank you for your enquiry to the Electoral Commission.

The Office for National Statistics is responsible for publishing electoral statistics in the UK. The Commission is however, currently working with the ONS, General Register Office for Scotland and Northern Ireland Statistics Research Agency to plan for a match of Census data against the electoral registers. This study should provide information on how registration levels differ across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It will also provide details on which groups are more likely to be missing from the register. We anticipate the findings from this project will not be available until 2013 although they will relate to the December 2010 and April 2011 registers.

In addition, the Ethnic Minority British Election Study (EMBES) reviewed the voting pattern of five ethnic minority groups at the 2010 general election. The data from this study is now online:
http://bes.utdallas.edu/2009/embes.php
The EMBES study team are currently reviewing the data and will be publishing analysis of the findings over the next year. This includes details of registration and voting patterns of these five ethnic minority groups. The Electoral Commission also intends to use this data in a report on electoral registration to be published at the end of December 2011.

With regard to your second question, it is not possible to analyse demographic trends in participation using official data due to the secrecy of the ballot and no personal data such as age, gender or ethnicity is recorded in the electoral register. However, based on analysis of their voting-intention surveys conducted in the run-up to the election, Ipsos MORI were able to make some estimates of participation among different groups at the 2010 general elections (but were not able to do this by ethnic group). Here is the link to the data:

http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublic...

The 2010 post-election public opinion survey does suggest that white people were more likely to vote than those from BME groups. This is backed up by some other evidence, such as MORIs 2005 report called ‘Black and Minority Ethnic Survey’ (see Turnout section page 10):

http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__...

I hope this helps.

Kind Regards

Iredia Oboh
Public Information Adviser
3 Bunhill Row
London EC1Y 8YZ
Tel: 020 7271 0592
Fax: 020 7271 0505
Textphone: 18001 020 7271 0592
www.electoralcommission.org.uk<http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/>
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