Dear Supporters of Our Denied the Vote Campaign!

After the scandal of vote denied campaign when over 1 million EU citizens were denied a vote in the European elections, we thought we had seen the back of any further backsliding with regard to EU citizens' rights to vote.

EU citizens still have the right to vote in local, mayoral and regional elections in the UK.

From June this year, however, only EU Citizens who arrived before 1 Jan. 2021 or whose country of origin has a bilateral voting rights agreement with the UK will be able to do so. This will create a two-tier system for EU Citizens’ voting rights.

Local authorities will be faced with the task of removing en masse large numbers of EU Citizens from the electoral roll. 

Such a deliberate and systemic act of voter disenfranchisement as is now being planned (and has already been legislated for) has never been tried before.

The new measures will be complicated, time-consuming and expensive. They also fly in the face of attempts to build a more inclusive democracy in the UK.

The actor, writer and campaigner Kate Willoughby, who is campaigning for New Europeans UK in the role of the suffragette Emily Willding Davison, sees a parallel between the right for women to vote at the start of the last century and the voting rights of EU Citizens in the UK today.

Speaking in Westminster at the lauch of our Get Out the Vote campaign for EU citizens, Kate said:

"Our votes are our voices at the ballot box - they are a precious heartbeat that enables our democracy to be fully representative.”

“It’s time for EU Citizens to stand up and make their voices heard, just as we suffragettes did over 100 years ago.”

Past experience has shown that the Government will forget to tell EU Citizens that they have the right to vote, even though they have a duty to do so.

That is why we have decided to act. 

It is vitally important that there is a strong turn out as possible from EU citizens at the local, mayoral and regional elections taking place in England on 2 May (including the GLA, though not the borough, elections in London) if we are to powerfully challenge the Government's decision to strip some EU citizens of their vote from June.

With your support, we will:

• produce information advising EU Citizens of their right to vote,
• put this information in the hands of EU citizens by distributing the information both in the form of printed material and online,
• engage with community groups, public bodies and media across England to ask them to promote registration and participation by EU Citizens,
• contact all those responsible for elections in government to make sure they are proactively informing EU Citizens of their right to register and vote,
• liaise with the Electoral Commission to prevent a repeat of the scandals of 2014 and 2019 when over 1m EU Citizens were denied a vote.

We ask you to act now so that we can do all this in good time for the Greater London Authority Elections and local and elections taking place in England on 2 May.

Are you willing to do what you can to help us defend the voting rights of all EU citizens in the UK by maximising their participation in the local and GLA elections on 2 May?

Pledge your support to make sure the votes of all EU Citizens are counted 

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