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<p>The Electoral Commission undertakes periodic research into the accuracy and completeness
of the electoral registers in the UK. Information is collected from a sample of households,
and details of residents are then matched against actual register entries to generate
the estimates of accuracy and completeness.</p><p>The last study assessed the December
2015 registers and was published in 2016. The Commission found that:</p><ul><li>In
Great Britain, the local government registers were 84% complete, meaning that 16%
of eligible electors did not have a correct register entry.</li><li>In Northern Ireland,
the local government register were 79% complete, meaning that 21% of eligible electors
did not have a correct register entry.</li></ul><p>By applying these estimates to
Office for National Statistics data, the Commission calculated that:</p><ul><li>In
Great Britain, between 7.8 and 8.5 million eligible people were not correctly registered.</li><li>In
Northern Ireland, between 275,000 and 330,000 eligible people were not correctly registered.</li></ul><p>This
does not mean that these people were entirely missing from the registers; many will
have had an entry at a previous address. It is not possible to determine this figure
because of the absence of a consistent, unique identifier for individual electors
on the registers.</p><p>The results of the Commission’s next accuracy and completeness
study will be published in the coming months.</p>
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