Individual electoral registration still needs a lot of work, if it is not to be a car crash for British democracy

Most of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition’s original programme of constitutional reform has conspicuously failed to get implemented (notably AV, Westminster boundary changes and House of Lords reform). Yet, individual electoral registration (IER), making each voter register themselves instead of a ‘head of household’ doing it, has been pushed through and implementation is about to start. The Electoral Commission calls this the ‘biggest change to the voter registration process since the universal franchise was introduced’. Toby James shows how the reform may yet mean a giant step backwards for British democracy, unless implementation is superbly handled