Registration deadline looms for June 8 election
Voters who want to have their say in the UK General Election have until late on Monday to register
Anyone eligible to vote in the UK General Election on June 8 who has not yet registered has until 11.59pm on Monday, May 22, to do so.
The straightforward voter registration process takes just a few minutes to complete online.
Ballot papers are already being sent out to addresses in France where voters have already registered.
Due to the short time available between now and election day, the Electoral Commission has advised that Britons living overseas who are registered to vote should apply for a proxy vote at this stage, due to the short time-frame. Proxy vote forms for overseas voters are available by clicking on this link.
Registration of overseas voters has improved since the UK introduced online registration. Numbers tripled to more than 100,000 for the 2015 general election and then again more than doubled for the referendum, with around 264,000 registered at the end of last year.
Even so, hundreds of thousands of eligible overseas voters did not register to vote last year – and more than one-million others could not do so due to the ‘15-year rule’ which bans voting after 15 years abroad.
Removing this rule was a Conservative Party manifesto promise and a ‘votes for life’ bill was listed in the 2015 Queen’s Speech documents, but was not put before parliament.
