While the date of the next UK general election itself remains in the hands of the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, one thing is certain: when the campaign begins it has the potential to be one of the most perilous and chaotic in the country’s history, for a variety of reasons.
One point is worth noting immediately: although the UK is often lumped in with the long list of countries holding elections in 2024, Sunak could theoretically hold it as late as January 2025, maximising the Conservatives’ full five-year term.
But assuming he opts for a spring or autumn election, as most pundits expect, beyond the politics there will be a series of new factors in play that are making electoral officials and even government ministers nervous.
The first is an entirely self-imposed challenge: this will be the first national election in which voters will have to show photo ID at the polling station, something ubiquitous in many other countries but made more tricky in the UK given the lack of national ID cards.
Surveys have shown only limited knowledge of the new rules, and if large numbers of would-be voters are turned away, particularly those from more vulnerable communities, who are less likely to possess the necessary documents, it could create accusations of unfairness.
A parallel worry is a potential shortage of electoral officials. UK elections are largely run by a longstanding army of often older local people paid a one-off fee, and there have been warnings that many of these are deciding that having to turn away lots of potential voters is a step too far.
When it comes to external threats and concerns about hacking, disinformation and other malevolence from outside actors, the UK is in the peculiar position of being both less vulnerable than many other nations but also – according to some government critics – less prepared.
Unlike some other countries, for example the US, the votes in a UK general election are cast and counted entirely by hand, making attempts to distort the actual result almost impossible.
“It would be very difficult for hackers literally to affect the tabulation of the votes and affect the vote count, so I think our electoral processes are probably safe in that regard,” said Joe Burton, professor of international security at Lancaster University.
“But if you’re hacking and leaking voter data, and foreign actors are targeting and trying to compile databases on eligible UK voters, that in itself undermines trust in the democratic process.”
It is the latter that could prove problematic for the UK, not least after it emerged earlier this year that the Electoral Commission, the UK’s elections watchdog, was subjected to a cyber-attack, which accessed the data of 40 million voters and went undetected for a year.
Hostile states who may want to try to interfere in the UK’s election, Burton argues, are less likely to try to skew the result, in part because of the paper-based system, but also because, unlike in the US, both main parties have broadly similar foreign policy objectives, notably in maintaining strong support for Ukraine.
Such efforts would instead be expected to focus on longer-term attempts to sow division and to harm confidence in the electoral system.
“I think we’re probably less vulnerable to divisive content spreading than the United States, and UK foreign policy towards Russia is fairly bipartisan,” Burton said.
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“The worry instead is more death by 1,000 cuts – this wider process of feeding mistrust about the integrity of our electoral processes and the integrity of our democracy.”
Combating such potential efforts – as well as trying to keep across misinformation on social media including AI-generated fake audio and video – is the government’s relatively new Defending Democracy Taskforce.
A cross-government body chaired by the security minister, Tom Tugendhat, this in turn houses the Election Security Preparedness unit, which will work with government departments, the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the security services to try to prepare for what threats might come in an election year.
Labour, the main UK opposition party and the predicted winner of the election, if polling stays the same, has some private doubts about the effectiveness of this machinery and the relative opaqueness of the taskforce’s work.
While the UK government appears “cognisant” of the risks, Burton argued, there was a worry that the efforts might not be enough as yet, especially given the sheer speed of advances in areas like AI since the last UK election in 2019.
“There are things that are happening, like the Defending Democracy TaskForce and the Joint Election Security Preparedness unit, and the advice that the government is giving to candidates across the country about protecting their computer systems,” he said.
“But I don’t think that these efforts are all that substantive, and probably more needs to be done across government to cope with this type of threat.”
