Requiring voters to show ID was an attempt to “gerrymander,” Jacob Rees-Mogg has suggested — despite insistence from Conservatives locally and nationally that the scheme was about protecting democracy.

The Conservative MP for North East Somerset said in a speech this week: “Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding that their clever schemes come back to bite them, as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections.”

Gerrymandering refers to manipulating who votes in an election, typically through changing constituency boundaries, to deliberately favour one party over another.

The requirement for voters to show a photo ID at polling stations in order to vote was a Conservative manifesto policy brought in under the current government and in effect, for the first time, at the recent local elections on May 4th.

Conservatives on Bath and North East Somerset Council had rejected accusations by the Liberal Democrats’ accusation that it was “egregious voter suppression” and insisted it was necessary to prevent voter fraud.

But now the comments by Mr Rees-Mogg — who was leader of the House of Commons at the time the rules were passed into law — suggest that he also saw the legislation as an attempt to help the Conservatives in the election.

But he said that it had backfired, stating: “We found that people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative. So we made it harder for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well.

“It was one of the glories of our country actually that we did on an honesty basis when the real problem is with postal voting.”

In the local elections — the first to require showing ID at polling stations — the Conservatives went from having ten councillors on Bath and North East Somerset Council to three, as 56 people locally were blocked from voting at polling stations by the new rules and an unknown number stayed home.

Former Chew Valley councillor Vic Pritchard, who had led the Conservatives on the council until he lost his seat in the election, said:  “I didn’t know we would get wiped out.”

He added: “We couldn’t have done very much worse. We have only got three seats now.”

Mr Rees-Mogg had been speaking at the National Conservatism conference about Labour’s proposal to allow EU nationals to vote in general elections, which he said was an attempt by then to “gerrymander” in favour of the Labour party.

But he said: “Don’t get too fretful about random schemes brought up by the socialists because gerrymandering doesn’t really work.”

EU nationals currently cannot vote in general elections but they can vote and stand in local elections.

LDRS, John Wimperis