The government is finally announcing some good reforms to the electoral system: making people provide ID before they can cast their vote. I have never understood why the ability for people to just rock up to the polling booth and cast a vote providing only the barest minimum of information to “prove” that they are who they say they are and undertake quite possibly the most important action that any British adult can.

They also plan to introduce individual voter registration, rather than registering by household. Again, this is something I welcome because it is sheer common sense. Fewer people should end up being left off the Electoral Register, and those who are will be not included entirely due to their own choice.

From a civil liberties stand point, I can see one potential against these reforms – primarily that having to show photo ID to vote could be used as a reason to bring in ID cards. But that isn’t the case. Pretty much everyone has either a photo driving licence or a passport, or some other form of identification, so ID cards are entirely unnecessary. After all, all the people at the polling station need to be able to do is match your face to the picture on the card and your name to a list.

What these reforms will do is add a required extra layer of security to our democratic process. There have been at least 42 convictions for electoral fraud in Britain in the past seven years, and there are almost certainly those that have been missed. A single case of electoral fraud is one too many, and this will help reduce the risk. And it’s not hard to take some ID with you.

Once this comes in to place, the area by far most open to fraud will be the postal vote system .