More than 300,000 people, including over 200,000 under-35s, registered to vote in the general election on Friday in what is thought to be the largest surge in pre-election registration in UK political history.
The race to join the electoral roll took place on the unofficial National Voter Registration Day declared by campaigners and backed by civil society groups and trade unions with the social media hashtag #RegisterToVote.
Some 308,000 registrations were recorded in the space of 24 hours, the vast majority of them online.
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Among those signing up to vote in the 12 December general election were 103,000 under-25s, 103,000 25-34 year-olds, 53,000 35-44 year-olds, 28,500 45-54 year-olds and around 20,000 over-54s.
The figures, released by the Cabinet Office, represent a boost for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, which enjoys its strongest support among younger generations and backed yesterday’s registration drive.
The party will be hoping the numbers may help it recreate the “youthquake” effect credited by some for boosting its vote in 2017.
Mr Corbyn said: “Yesterday Labour got behind National Voter Registration Day – unlike the Conservatives – because we want you to have a say in the future of our country.
“And more than 300,000 people registered to vote. Make sure you can have your say on 12th December.”
Friday’s total does not match the 500,000-plus who crashed the government’s online registration system on the deadline for registration to vote in the 2016 EU referendum.
But it tops the spike of 246,487 in 2017, which is believed to be the previous record for pre-election registrations.
An Electoral Commission spokesperson said: “It’s great to see so many organisations working alongside us to encourage people to register to vote. These efforts are clearly delivering results.
“However, with up to one in six people potentially unregistered there is more work to do to ensure that they can register by the 26 November deadline. It only takes five minutes to register at gov.uk/register-to-vote.”
Social media is an increasingly important battle ground in elections – and home to many questionable claims pumped out by all sides. If social media sites won’t investigate the truth of divisive advertising, we will. Please send any political Facebook advertising you receive to digitaldemocracy@independent.co.uk, and we will catalogue and investigate it. Read more here.
