If you've moved house in the last few months...

[Mykingdomforanickname]

...did you actively make sure you registered to vote at your new address?

Have been thinking about this after reading reports relating to the registration deadline for European elections being 7 May which suggest that there are literally millions of people in the UK who would be eligible to vote, but have not done so. I assume this will mainly be people who have moved house since their local council last sent out its periodic voter registration forms to everyone in the area.

I've not moved house for many years, and these days if I did move I would definitely take care to register if I knew there was an election due to take place soon. However, I am middle aged and if I think back to when I was a student/in my early 20s (and did in practice move about a lot) I don't recall ever having actively taken steps to register to vote (as opposed to completing voter registration forms when they happened to drop through my letterbox). Wondering what others do. (For anyone needing to register, it can be done via this link www.gov.uk/register-to-vote , but if you're wanting to vote in EU elections, you'll need to be quick as deadline is tomorrow!)

Yes I did, I had it on a list of address and details to change

Oops pressed send too early. Not sure I would have even thought about it in my early 20’s though!

Thanks for this thread OP! I moved a fortnight ago and would have completely missed this deadline if I hadn’t seen your thread!

I have read that younger adults are much less likely to vote. I wonder how much of that is due to younger people moving around much more often and not being on the electoral register for their current address. Counting from when I first went off to university to my 26th birthday, I lived at nine different addresses (if I include term-time addresses as a student) and I can't imagine that number is that unusual for that age group. Can see how a lot of younger people could end up dropping off the electoral roll accidentally.

I didn’t even think about voting when I was at uni and then moving around for a few years afterwards and so completely agree with you. The turnout of our local elections was 29.7% and it would be interesting to see the age demographic within that percentage. Great thread to remind people to register!

You're welcome, ILoveMaxiBondi! But won't ask that question as don't really want this thread to turn into a "for or against Brexit" thread - there has certainly been not shortage of those on MN!

Haven't specifically looked, but wondering how many wards actually did get more than half of the electorate turning out to vote in the local elections. I think any that did must have been a small minority. I live in an area which will have a much lower population turnover than many, but turn-out was still well below 50%.

Interestingly, this is the first time that we didn’t get any of the local candidates coming round on their door to door campaign to try to canvass for votes. Not a single one, not even a leaflet! I did wonder if that is because they anticipated how low the turnout would be or if the turnout was low due to the lack of information around each candidate?

But hopefully your thread will remind people to register so that they don’t miss their opportunity to vote (if they so wish).

My understanding is the turn-out for the most recent local elections was fairly similar to previous local elections. We also didn't have any canvassers or leaflets this time. The councillor in our ward holds his seat fairly comfortably, so I can see in that scenario how all parties might have concluded that campaigning in our ward was a waste of time/money. Nevertheless we have had canvassers and leaflets in the past. I wonder whether the parties had their eye on campaign funding for the European elections (or the possibility of a General Election before long) and were therefore more careful about how much they spent on the local election campaign.

yes I did.
and received my postal voting already in the post.

It's funny, my rational side can see that voting by post makes a lot of sense because it avoids the risk that some unexpected event on polling day prevents you from getting to vote. But for some reason I actually like walking up to the polling station and putting my ballot paper directly into the ballot box!

Now wondering whether I have produced an extra vote for a party of which I would approve or one that I would never ever vote for

i have moved in the last 6 months and forgot to register.
Haven’t done it yet either despite having had postal Voting forms redirected to us cos I’m lazy