Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:07 pm on 9 November 2021.
One of the more disappointing parts of the Elections Bill from the United Kingdom Government is that it takes a whole range of different powers, and none of those powers seek to encourage participation. None of them seek to extend the participation in the democratic process. All of them seek to reduce democratic participation, and I think whatever the individual issue is—you've spoken about voter ID on this occasion, but whatever the issue is—we do need to protect our democracy. I agree with you on that. I think you've chosen the wrong issue upon which to focus this afternoon. I think there are other issues, and I'll come to those before I conclude, but there is an absolute need to continue to look imaginatively and creatively, to look at how we can encourage more people to vote and to encourage people to vote in different ways. I would like to see, Minister—and I hope you'll be able to address this in your reply to this debate—how we can introduce multiday voting to ensure that people can vote over, for example, a weekend, rather than simply on a Thursday. How can we introduce electronic voting to ensure that people can vote from wherever they happen to be? How can we ensure that the electoral registers are all electronic so that I could vote in Clwyd West or Pontypridd or Blaenau Gwent, and the Member for Clwyd West could vote in Blaenau Gwent as well, to ensure that we've got the maximum participation, to ensure that the technology that is available to us is used to maximise participation? I hope that we're able to do that.
In concluding, Deputy Presiding Officer, there are two things that I would seek the Welsh Government support in doing to protect the integrity of our elections. First of all is to empower the Electoral Commission to regulate access to foreign funding, to dark money that we've seen polluting our politics in recent years, and also to empower either Ofcom or the Electoral Commission to regulate the misinformation and deliberate disinformation that we've seen over the last few years. That is where our democracy is being undermined. And I'll tell you now, Darren Millar, where that takes us: it takes us to the American Capitol on 6 January earlier this year. That's where that sort of politics takes us. First, you try to stop people voting, you put all the barriers in front of people to prevent them from voting, you gerrymander the constituencies and, if all of that fails, you use disinformation and misinformation to undermine the integrity of an election and try to bring down your democracy rather than to give way.
And the final point—