Thursday 5 February is national voter registration day. But the move to individual voter registration has made a simple process more complex and potentially less democratic.  Until 2009, one person in each household completed the registration for every resident eligible to vote. However, changing social values and some small but well-documented cases of electoral fraud generated a case for individual voter registration, passed into law in 2009.  Individual electoral registration voting may be a good idea but the way it has been introduced in the past four years has been a disaster. Voters whose existing details cannot be confirmed by data matching with a single Department for Work and Pensions database of national insurance numbers have to provide additional forms of identification.  The most recent attempt in 2013 at this data matching found more than 7 million voters currently on the register were not matched and would need to provide additional evidence of residence. The Cabinet Office insists the switch to individual voter registration will not affect the general election since anyone on the old household register in December 2013 will be entitled to vote in 2015 - but anyone who has moved house in the interim does need to re-register.  Labour has already warned that 1 million people have fallen off the voters’ register in the past year. Many of those missing voters are young people and students.  The burden has been put on cash-strapped local councils to contact 46 million voters instead of 20 million households. Some have been able to, but many simply don’t have the money or IT skills.  We have made a simple process of registration much more complex. For instance, a newly-married woman who chooses to change her name is now required to provide two forms of identification before being accepted back on to the register.  Related: 1m voters lost from electoral roll, says Ed Miliband  But the group most affected is students. Previously, universities, like other institutional landlords, could provide a single list of eligible voters to the local authority. Now every student has to register individually. That is not necessarily a priority during freshers’ week. The result is levels of registration plummeting from 100% to less than 10% in most university residences.  Related: Who are Britain's 1m-plus missing voters?  However, the real impact has yet to be felt. The 7 million voters on the register but not data matched will be able to vote in the 2015 general election, as long as they have not moved, but will be removed from the register if they have not provided extra information by December 2015.  This system disenfranchises the mobile, the young and those in private rented accommodation – mainly those living in urban areas. At a time when the urban population is growing quickly, the number of registered voters in these areas is not keeping pace. A parliamentary boundary review is expected. If it takes place after millions of people are removed from the electoral register we could see the biggest transfer of parliamentary representation and political power from urban to rural areas for more than a century.  The tragedy is all the greater because a more efficient and cheaper version of individual registration is available. Australia has used individual voter registration for years and works on the simple principle that once registered, voters stay on the register and areracked by cross-referencing multiple databases if they move address.  The state of New South Wales, with a population of 7 million, achieves a 95% accurate register through this process with fewer staff and smaller budgets than comparable areas in the UK. The UK, however, persists with a version of registration where eligibility has to be confirmed after every change of address and the whole process is administered by more than 400 local councils doing the same job in complete isolation.  For the past 100 years we have been able to rely on the electoral register both to supply an accurate measure of those eligible to vote and also a source of those able to serve for jury service. The rushed implementation of individual voting has put both of these vital democratic bulwarks under threat.  Parliament should ensure that the process of individual voting is made fit for purpose - if not for the 2015 general election, then at least for all future ones.  Paul Wheeler is the founder of the Political Skills Forum  Sign up for your free weekly Guardian Public Leaders newsletter with news and analysis sent direct to you every Thursday. Follow us on Twitter via @Guardianpublic
More than 1 million voters have already dropped off the electoral register and 7 million more could follow after the 2015 election, explains Paul Wheeler