10m people are not “denied a vote”

‘Let Us Vote’ is a campaign launched by the Another Europe group, on 8th May 2019. It claims that “up to 10m people are denied a vote on the basis of the current rules”.

This figure for adults aged 18 or over is a substantial overestimate, which confuses country of birth with nationality.

Where the Another Europe figure come from

Information for the ‘Let Us Vote’ launch event states that:

All together, up to 10 million people are denied a vote by the current rules: 7 million UK residents and 3 million UK citizens abroad.

This image, which drops the “up to” prefix, contains a substantial overestimate.

Turning to the campaign’s website, we see an explanation of this 7m figure in their FAQs:

Oxford University’s Migration Observatory estimates that there are 9.4 million foreign-born people living in the UK. Approximately 1 million of these are Commonwealth citizens, and 400,000 are Irish-born. The rest — around 8 million — cannot vote in general elections and could not vote in the 2016 EU referendum.

There are around 5 million British people living abroad. 60%, or 3 million of these have been abroad for more than 15 years and so cannot vote.

Altogether, this amounts to more than 11 million people. We round down to 10 million to take account of factors like those…