United Kingdom Register to Vote

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice. It documents the provenance of the published fields and flow and states the current verification claim honestly.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-01

The document was derived from and cross-checked against the official sources below, but the full field-by-field comparison the practice requires (manual-source-review-v1 → Procedure step 2) has not yet been completed and recorded against the live online registration flow at gov.uk. It therefore remains draft, not verified.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): gb/co/register-to-vote / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.2.0
• Authority: Cabinet Office, Electoral Registration policy; applications are processed by local Electoral Registration Officers.
• Primary source URL: https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote
• Secondary source (form structure): the ITR-E paper application ("Individual Electoral Registration", Standard form, England edition), a fillable PDF published under assets.publishing.service.gov.uk, linked from GOV.UK's "Register to vote (paper forms)" collection.
• Official form id: none for the online service; the equivalent paper form is ITR-E (England, Standard). GOV.UK's online service has no published form number of its own.
• Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-07-01 (both sources confirmed live at authoring time)
• Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (initial authoring source-review)

Why the paper form was used as the field-level source

The gov.uk/register-to-vote landing page describes the online service in prose ("you'll be asked for your National Insurance number", "it usually takes about 5 minutes") but does not publish a field-by-field specification of its screens. The ITR-E fillable PDF is the Electoral Commission's own paper equivalent of the same underlying registration data model (name, date of birth, nationality, National Insurance number, address) and was extracted field-by-field from its AcroForm structure (widget names and tooltip text recovered from the PDF's decompressed content streams), giving an authoritative, numbered-section field list. This mirrors the approach already used for gb/hmrc/self-assessment-tax-return-sa100 (PDF-derived transcription) and us/sss/selective-service-registration (online service with no form number).

What was confirmed against the source

| Source element (ITR-E section) | Field(s) | |---|---| | 1 — Your address: name, address, postcode, "another address?", email, phone | firstNames, lastName, addressLine1/2, addressTown, postcode, livesAtAnotherAddress, email, phone | | 2 — Previous address (moved in last 12 months), overseas-voter sub-question | movedInLastYear, previousAddress, previousAddressPostcode, previousAddressWasOverseasRegistered | | 3 — Nationality (free text; "if more than one, include them all") | nationality | | 4 — Your immigration status (EU Settlement Scheme continuity since 31 Dec 2020, for EU nationals other than Denmark/Luxembourg/Poland/Portugal/Spain) | euSettledStatusContinuousSince2020 | | 5 — Date of birth, with an age-band fallback if unknown | dateOfBirth, dateOfBirthUnknownRange | | 6 — National Insurance number (5-part boxed entry; optional) | nationalInsuranceNumber | | 7 — Previous name and date of change (optional) | previousName, previousNameChangeDate | | 8 — The open register opt-out | openRegisterOptOut | | 9 — Voting at the polling station / postal or proxy interest | votingMethodInterest | | 10 — Reason if NI number / DOB / nationality cannot be given | cannotProvideDetailsReason | | 11 — Declaration and today's date | declarationAddressConfirmed, declarationDate |

The gov.uk landing page separately confirmed: the ~5-minute completion time (informational, not modelled), the age floors (16 in England/Northern Ireland, 14 in Scotland/Wales — recorded in dateOfBirth's description), and the open-register opt-out mechanism (Section 8, matches the PDF).

Scope and jurisdiction notes

• Great Britain only. gov.uk/register-to-vote covers England, Scotland, and Wales. Northern Ireland maintains a separate, permanent electoral register via the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland (nidirect.gov.uk), which is a different service with different mechanics and is out of scope of this document. jurisdiction.level is national per the discovery catalog entry; a future minor version could tighten this to explicitly exclude Northern Ireland if that proves ambiguous to consumers.
• Age eligibility varies by nation (16 in England/NI, 14 in Scotland/Wales at the point of registration, though voting itself requires 18); this is recorded in the dateOfBirth field description rather than modelled as a per-nation branch, consistent with the flat v0.2 field model.
• The ITR-E is the England edition of the paper form; Scotland (ITR-S) and Wales (ITR-W) editions exist with the same field set and differing eligibility text. The field set was treated as nation-invariant for this document; this is a reasonable but not independently confirmed assumption.
• Nationality is free text, not an enum. The source explicitly instructs applicants to write in their nationality/nationalities rather than choosing from a fixed list, so nationality is modelled as type: string, matching the source's own field type.
• The full EU member-state list gating euSettledStatusContinuousSince2020 (the source names it applies to citizens of any EU country other than Denmark, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, which are eligible on a separate basis) was only partially recoverable from the retrieved source text; the field description states the rule qualitatively rather than asserting a closed country list GovSchema has not itself confirmed.

What is NOT yet independently verified

• The exact screen order and wording of the live gov.uk/register-to-vote online flow were not captured screen-by-screen; sourceRef annotations cite the ITR-E paper form's section numbers, which the online service's data model is believed to mirror but which was not independently confirmed field-by-field.
• Constraint patterns (National Insurance number, UK postcode, phone) reuse patterns already established elsewhere in the registry (gb/hmrc/self-assessment-tax-return-sa100) for consistency, not citations of a published Cabinet Office validation rule.
• The address model splits the source's single free-text address block into addressLine1/addressLine2/addressTown/postcode, per registry convention; this is a GovSchema normalization, not a 1:1 transcription of the source form.

Path to a verified claim (next step)

To advance to status: verified, a reviewer applies manual-source-review-v1 (Procedure step 2 field-by-field against the live gov.uk/register-to-vote online flow specifically, step 3 flow), confirms the source is authoritative, resolves any discrepancy by shipping a new schema version (immutability — VERSIONING §3, practice Procedure step 5), and records the outcome here plus sets status: verified with a current verification.lastVerifiedAt/nextReviewBy.

Re-verification

Per the practice's Cadence, nextReviewBy is set to 2027-01-01 (6 months). Re-check the source on or before that date and on any source.url change.