Electoral roll: 2022

For Wales (and for England), electoral statistics are taken from data supplied to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) by local Electoral Registration Officers.

Electoral statistics are annual counts of the number of people who are registered on electoral registers, and so entitled to vote. The total number of electors consists of residential qualifiers and attainers. Attainers are people who reach voting age during the year up to the next register (December 2023).

This statistical headline does not include information about Senedd and local government electors in Wales for 2022. It includes information about UK parliamentary electors in Wales only. Last year (Electoral roll: 2021) we were made aware that the published statistics have not reflected changes to eligibility criteria for Senedd and local government elections in Wales since 2020. This continues to be the case. The information that is collected by the ONS from electoral registration officers in Wales does not currently include all 16 year old electors and 15 year old attainers in Wales registered to vote in the Senedd and local government elections. We continue to work with the ONS to resolve this matter so that we can publish corrected statistics for Senedd and local government electors in Wales for the period 2020 to 2022. Please note, this also means we are unable to update our StatsWales tables.

See Electoral statistics, UK Statistical bulletins (ONS) for more information.

Main points

• The total number of UK parliamentary electors registered to vote as at 1 December 2022 in Wales is 2,304,700.
• This is a decrease of 0.1% between 1 December 2021 and 1 December 2022, and a decrease of 0.8% from the peak on 2 March 2020.
• The total number of UK parliamentary electors registered to vote in the UK as a whole fell by 0.2% between 1 December 2021 and 1 December 2022.

Notes

Electoral rolls provide counts of the number of people registered to vote. It should be noted that the number of people eligible to vote is not the same as the resident population. There are various reasons for this. For example, not everyone who is usually resident is entitled to vote (foreign citizens from outside of the European Union and Commonwealth, prisoners, etc. are not eligible), some people do not register to vote, and people who have more than one address may register in more than one place. Further, there is inevitably some double counting of the registered electorate as electoral registration officers vary in how quickly they remove people from the registers after they have moved away from an area or after they have died. These factors have a differential impact from area to area. This means care needs to be exercised when comparing population estimates with the electoral roll.

The difference in who is entitled to vote at UK Parliamentary and Senedd Cymru and local government elections depends largely on age, residence and citizenship conditions. Local government electors, for example, include those European Union citizens resident in the UK who are not entitled to vote in UK Parliamentary elections, while UK Parliamentary electors include British citizens resident overseas who are not entitled to vote in local government elections.

The Senedd and Election (Wales) Act 2020 made provisions to lower the voting age in Senedd elections to 16, meaning that 16 and 17 year olds were able to vote for the first time at the Senedd elections in 2021.

The Local Government and Elections (Wales) Act 2021 made provisions to lower the voting age for local government elections to allow 16 and 17 year olds to vote.

The data for Wales for December 2020 and December 2021, excludes local government electoral registrations for attainers aged 15 years and electors aged 16 years. For December 2022, with the exceptions of Cardiff, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Monmouthshire, Newport and Wrexham the counts of local government and Senedd electoral registrations for areas in Wales exclude attainers aged 15 and electors aged 16.

Eligibility to vote in UK Parliamentary elections has not changed, with the minimum voting age being 18 years old.

Further information on who can vote in different UK elections can be found on the GOV.UK website.

The Parliamentary Constituencies and Assembly Regions (Wales) (Amendment) Order 2011 made changes to the then National Assembly for Wales constituency boundaries and electoral regions as a result of local government boundary changes in six local authority areas. The Order did not make the same changes to the boundaries of the UK Parliamentary constituencies. The Order came into effect on 14 December 2011 therefore from this point onwards there are some differences between the UK Parliamentary constituencies and the Senedd Cymru Constituencies.

As agreed with the Office for Statistics Regulation, these statistics will be updated at 12.30pm on the day of release by ONS.