British democracy has been hard fought: by the barons demanding Magna Carta at Run-nymede, Oliver Cromwell executing an arrogant King, by suffragettes chaining themselves to Parliament, and Winston Churchill committing us to “wage war against a monstrous tyranny”.

Step forward Sam Younger, the new guardian of your vote. This mild-mannered gentleman in a poky Westminster office has to fight against fraud, and whatever it is that leaves our polling booths increasingly deserted.

Next week are the local elections, and many predict that record numbers will not bother to exercise their democratic rights. As Mr Younger spoke, however, it occurred to us that even if he were not the problem, he certainly sounded like the problem. If he accuses parties of merging into the middle ground, Mr Younger is, by his own admittance, someone who seeks consensus rather than confrontation. Could it be that he is not the champion of what is most sacred in British life, but rather the living symbol of what our democracy seems to have become?

He began by telling us that voter turnout had tumbled since the commission was set up six years ago. “I think quite often more transparency and more focus brings out the warts and the problems rather than instantly leading to improvement,” he said.

So if he has had a part in turning people off voting, what can he do to switch them back on? Mr Younger insisted that it was not up to him: “There are certain things a body like ours can do and should do, and they centre mainly around making sure that, at the point where people say they would like to go out and vote, that they know how to do so, they are on the register and able to do so . . . What we can’t do, and I don’t think should do, is to make the effort actually to persuade people specifically to go out and vote.” This is not a speech to set the blood, or the voters, racing. It is also at odds with the mission statement of the Electoral Commission: “To foster public confidence and participation in the democratic process in the UK.”

The role of the Electoral Commission appears to have shrunk in the six years of its existence from champion of democracy to technocratic regulator of the sometimes minor transgressions of political donors. The UK Independence Party, for instance, may be bankrupted by a court battle with the Electoral Commission all because its biggest donor was not technically on the electoral register at the time, having recently moved house.

Politics, Mr Younger said, is in his blood but, like any family relationship, it is not always easy. His father was a minister in the Attlee Government, his cousin was Sir George Younger, the former Conservative Scottish Secretary, and a great-grandfather was chairman of the Conservative Party. He was even christened in the House of Commons chapel.

Mr Younger was plagued throughout his youth by family friends asking him when he was to become an MP. He realised that he did not have it in him. “My interest on an issue is looking for common ground. I would have been a rotten barrister, I think. Just never thought of myself as a great debater and I think that is part of the reason. Politics is, of its nature, contentious and I am more interested in consensus than contention.”

His new mission is to guard the security of the ballot. There is a lot of fuss over the security of postal voting, but we wondered about voting in person. You traipse along to a polling station, claim to be whoever you like and they tick you off and you vote. No ID, no proof of address, nothing.

“There is a case for saying that we need to look again at voting in polling stations”, he said. In Northern Ireland they have to produce photographic ID before they can vote, “and I think on the agenda now for the rest of the UK is what would be appropriate . . . I think there is a very strong case for making sure we go down the road of tightening up the identification of polling station voting.”

Fingerprinting or other biometric identification could come into play; it might dovetail pretty neatly, we suggested, with the introduction of compulsory identity cards. “Were there to be compulsory ID cards, then they would undoubtedly be applied in elections,” he said. “There is no doubt if you had something that is a universal identifier, then you would use it in the electoral context as in others . . . It would be very good to have a way of doing this for elections; having incontrovertible identity.”

Some say Mr Younger’s low-key approach has achieved much to clean-up public life; others have been critical. Mr Younger’s term was recently extended by another two years taking him, conspiracists whispered, up to the denouement of the cash-for-honours inquiry and making him a convenient fall guy for the whole affair if the Government needed one.

Sir Hayden Phillips, author of a government-comissioned report on the cash-for-hours scandal, said that his work was not good enough. Sir Alistair Graham, the head of the political sleaze watchdog, said that Mr Younger’s passive approach to regulation amounted to regulatory failure.

For the first time, he flashed with emotion. “It would be quite wrong to do that and I cannot believe that that sort of view would actually pass scrutiny . . . I just don’t see this as an issue that can be laid at the commission’s door. And I don’t think any reasonable person would.”

Should he have acted, faster, and earlier, at the first hint of impropriety? “You could have an argument ex-post about whether we could have focused more activity on that over the period after the general election of 2005.”

Next Thursday he will be up all night, rushing from Leeds to Edinburgh and back again to observe counting. He has voted in every single election he has ever been eligible to cast a ballot, making him possibly the ultimate political anorak. So, we ask, trying to spark his enthusiasm, does he have a preference for postal voting, or a fondness for the traditional stubby pencil of the polling booth? It was a dull question, admittedly, but the answer was even duller: “Personally?” he looked alarmed. “No, I can see both as equally good ways of casting a vote.”

Forget the great, inspiring orations of Cromwell, or Churchill. There is a better quote to sum Mr Younger up, and it is from Tom Stoppard: “It’s not the voting that’s democracy. It’s the counting.”

— CV

Born 5 October 1951

Education Westminster School, Oxford

Family Married, one son

Career BBC World Service, joined as a producer, then head of Arabic Service, 1989–92, controller, Overseas Services, 1992–94; managing director, 1994–98. Director of English Touring Opera, 1999–; chief executive of the British Red Cross 1999-2001; first chairman of Electoral Commission 2001

Recreations choral singing

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