Fact check: Record for daily voter registration applications was set in 2019
A post on X, formerly Twitter, said June 18 broke the record for “the highest number of voter registration applications in a single day”. This was reposted and “liked” thousands of times on the platform.
Evaluation
The deadline to register to vote in 2019 saw a higher number of registrations, meaning the record was not broken ahead of this year’s General Election.
The facts
The Government’s dashboard for applications to join the electoral register has data going back to 2014.
The dashboard shows 632,863 people applied to vote on June 18 – the last possible day to register to vote in this year’s election.
But it also shows 659,666 did so on the deadline for the 2019 general election (November 26) – meaning the record was not broken in 2024.
In both cases the vast majority of applications were made online.
The PA news agency contacted the user who posted the claim on X who apologised for the error and later issued a correction.
This year’s tally did surpass the number of registrations on a single day before the 2017 and 2015 general elections – 581,651 applications were made on May 22 2017, while 485,012 were made on April 20 2015.
In addition, 537,796 people applied to vote on June 7 2016, the deadline for the EU referendum.
Links
Government voter registration dashboard (archived)
Voting applications, June 1-18 2024 (archived)
Voting applications, November 2019 (archived)
The correction on X (archived)
Voting applications, May 2017 (archived)
Voting applications, April 2015 (archived)
Voting applications, June 2016 (archived)
