Jisc’s student voter registration service, which allows university and college students to quickly and easily register to vote, has reached its first milestone – more than 1,000 student sign ups.

As the government gears up for a general election, it is hoped that the student voter registration service will help to increase democratic engagement from a voting cohort that is under-represented in elections1.

It will also significantly reduce the administrative burden on participating universities and colleges in England, which are now required by the Office for Students to enable the electoral registration of students.

The Higher Education and Research Act 2017 puts the onus on universities and colleges to do this. But that means a whole lot of extra work for academic registrars, setting up a raft of new systems and revising rules and practices around the collection of data. It’s an expensive and time-consuming headache.

A simple solution for the higher and further education sectors has been developed by Jisc, in consultation with the Academic Registrars Council, the Association of Heads of University Administration, and the UK’s electoral registrar community.

With students’ consent, the service collects essential information from the university (such as date of birth and full name) and the student (National Insurance number) and automatically transfers it to the relevant, participating electoral registrars at local authorities, reducing the effort and expense it would take for universities and colleges to work with multiple electoral registrars across the UK.

Jisc takes care of the contracting and the data is transferred securely via the UK Access Management Federation, which almost every university and college already uses.

The service, which emerged from a suggestion by Dr Paul Greatrix, registrar at the University of Nottingham, was piloted successfully ahead of the launch on 1 April, 2019. So far, 17 universities have signed up, with many others interested in doing so.

Dr Greatrix, whose university has started using the student voter registration service this term, says:

“Enabling student voter registration has been a significant challenge for many years. Now that all universities in England have a legal obligation to help enable students to get on to the electoral register, every institution will want to do this, as quickly and securely as possible.

“I’ve been really keen to address this problem and was convinced if anyone could come up with a secure and smart IT solution then Jisc could. I was really pleased, therefore, to be able to support this project to develop a straightforward way to enable more students to get on the electoral register and it is great to see how many universities are now getting on board.

“It’s vital that institutions enable their students to play a full part in the democratic process and I would strongly encourage all universities and students’ unions to get involved.”