What is the purpose of the electoral register?
Big benefit of being on: positive impact on your credit rating. Being on the Electoral Register signals to credit rating agencies that you are rooted in your community, and that you’re not afraid to let people know how to find you (or something like that.) As a result, not being on the electoral register can have a substantially negative effect on your credit rating in the UK, all else being equal. I’ve experienced this firsthand as a relative newcomer. I applied for a credit card to start building a credit rating in the UK, and got rejected. A few weeks later I was registered (with no other financial changes) and bang – banks started actually sending me credit card offers.
In the UK, councils sell edited copies of the electoral roll to whomever wants to buy them. Many (most?) of their customers are marketing firms, so if your details are on this version of the roll they’ll end up in various marketing companies’ mailing lists. I’m not sure how much detail gets passed on – I think it’s just name and address. Removing yourself from the electoral roll will mean you’re not in future versions of this list. On its own this isn’t a reason to take yourself off the electoral roll though; you can tell your council to take you off the version that gets sold while keeping you on the master document. If you trust the council to actually do this (or spend a few £hundred to buy the CD and check), this should protect your privacy while keeping your voting rights. They don’t exactly advertise this fact widely (after all, fewer names on the list means they can’t charge as much), but it should be on your local council’s website or accessible to whomever picks up their phone
If you’re not on it, you don’t get to vote. For anything. Ever. If you want to be off it, the most efficient way is to move house and not put your name on the form they send out each year when you’re inevitably sent one. If you don’t move house and don’t fill the form in next time, you’ll stay on the register and they won’t take you off for some years, if ever. If you fill out some other random name instead of your own you’re committing a criminal offence under the Representation of the People Acts. Don’t do that.
