It took until 1928, when the vote was granted to all adult women, for a universal franchise to be achieved in the UK. It took another generation, with the abolition of additional votes for business owners and university graduates in 1949, before the franchise could be described as ‘equal’.

To reach this point had taken more than a century and multiple Acts of Parliament – starting with the Great Reform Act of 1832, which extended the franchise to 7 per cent of the adult population. Along the way, campaigners were killed at Peterloo in 1819, 20 Chartists were killed by troops in Newport in 1839, and Emily Davidson died in 1913 after throwing herself in front of the king’s horse at the Derby. Countless more radicals, Chartists and Suffragettes were imprisoned for their campaigns to extend the franchise. But finally, in 1950, a general election was fought on universal and equal suffrage.

Or was it? It has long been recognised that our electoral system prevents all votes from counting equally (millions of votes are wasted in ‘safe’ seats, while a mere 100,000 votes cast in ‘marginal’ seats determine the outcome of the election). But it is also apparent that our system of voter registration has always led to a significant minority of voters being excluded from the electoral process.

The reasons are partly historical. As the franchise was extended from the Victorian period onwards, we remained reliant on the annual canvass of electors to compile the electoral registers. Carried out every autumn, this has proved reasonably effective in identifying eligible voters and updating the registers in light of population movement. Yet even in the 1950s there was still a core of 4 per cent of voters who were absent from the registers following the canvass. And because the registers were updated only once a year, by the time an election came around many more voters were effectively disenfranchised simply by moving house.

Since then, things have got worse. By 1990, around 8 per cent of eligible voters were completely absent from the registers. Registration levels then took a substantial further hit in the early 1990s, when some 600,000 voters de-registered in an attempt to avoid payment of the poll tax. Margaret Thatcher later claimed this helped the Conservatives win the 1992 election.

There was another big drop in registration levels in the early 2000s. Over half a million voters again disappeared from the registers and, this time, there is little evidence that they have returned. Those missing are most likely to be young people, members of ethnic minorities and residents of safe Labour seats in metropolitan areas.

Meanwhile, around one-tenth of voters continue to lose their right to vote each year because they move home. Younger voters and ethnic minority voters are also most likely to be disenfranchised in this way, since they are more mobile than other social groups. Although voters now have the right to register at other times in the year, few make use of this provision. As things stand, at least 15 per cent of eligible voters will be unable to cast ballots at the 2010 election, with this figure rising to 31 per cent among black and ethnic minority voters and 56 per cent among electors aged 18-24.

An urgent task for the incoming government must be to consider whether our system of electoral registration remains fit for purpose. There is also still time for political parties, electoral administrators, and voters themselves, to take action to improve the situation; voters can register up to 11 working days before the election. While a last-minute registration drive is essential, it may not be especially effective, however. Recent surveys suggest that candidates will do well to persuade two-thirds of registered electors to cast votes in 2010. Getting unregistered voters to the polls will be even more of an uphill struggle.

Stuart Wilks-Heeg is director of Democratic Audit and a lecturer at the University of Liverpool. He was also the lead author of the Electoral Commission’s report on the completeness and accuracy of the electoral registers, published on 3 March 2010 and available at www.electoralcommission.org.uk

However, the prospect of achieving a written constitution looks more remote than ever, given the way that the major parties together block crucial constitutional issues and prevent them reaching the political agenda. It seems we will continue to be one of only two countries in the world without one.

This is where our pamphlet comes in. We thought it was time to write down or ‘codify’ not what should happen to make our system democratic, but what happens in practice; and to do so from the standpoint of the governing elite that exercises power on our behalf but would prefer that its operation be mystified as much as possible. They recognise how important it is that such a document should never see the light of day.

The constitution begins by extolling the virtues of being unwritten:

It is a collection of laws, fictions, powers left over from the old monarchy and powers that we make up as we go along. It allows us to decide what governments can do; and best of all, only we have the power to change it … The great advantage of this flexibility is that once we have hit on a new way of behaving, it becomes part of the constitution. And we can modernise easily. So we have moved on from old-fashioned cabinet government to sofa government by the prime minister with trusted allies and special advisors. Presidential, yes, but faster and more efficient. This excellent state of affairs allows us to exercise executive power more or less as we please while the whole world admires us as a democracy.

There then follows a list of the ‘unspoken articles’ of what Jack Straw has termed our ‘executive democracy’. We understand that Sir Humphrey and his colleagues have chuckled particularly loudly at the following articles:

Government, like every subject, shall be free to do whatever is not unlawful. The government shall decide what is unlawful.

The government shall have the power to enact ministerial edicts, known as statutory instruments or Orders in Council, this secondary legislation being in effect law-making that can almost wholly escape parliamentary scrutiny and debate.

In the event of controversy over government actions, the government may have recourse to carefully chosen judges or former civil servants to hold an inquiry that has due respect for government’s need for support and discretion. The government shall set the terms of reference for any inquiry, have powers to suspend it or restrict public access to it, and may censor an inquiry report to prevent any information emerging which we say may harm state economic and security interests.

Civil servants … shall be allowed to enhance generous pensions by taking advantage of their departmental experience and contacts through lucrative appointments in relevant private companies.

We hope you will read the whole document with similar amusement. But we expect that it will also make you angry that this is the way we are governed in the 21st century.

We like to think that it makes an irresistible case for a written constitution, rooted in sound democratic principles and in popular sovereignty; but we would urge proponents of the status quo to come forward and make their case for its defence, on democratic, or indeed any other, grounds.

Of course, debate is not enough in itself, and particularly not if it is limited to converts to the cause. Some matters are simply too urgent to be left until the glorious day when our written constitution is unveiled. At the same time, voters need to be offered more than a Hobson’s choice at the 2010 election between political parties making rival claims about which areas of government spending they will cut.

The issues of how power is exercised, by whom and in whose interests, must be forced to the fore of the election debate. Over the next six months, the Power 2010 initiative will seek to bring these issues back onto the political agenda. It is a good job somebody is – the party conference season confirmed that it would be foolhardy to leave it to our political masters.

Download a copy of the pamphlet here