55. The sovereign United Kingdom Parliament can pass legislation on electoral matters, that is one of the issues in which it has reserved powers to legislate (except for Scottish local elections). In other words, it is a political and legal decision of Westminster to enact laws that settle different requirements for voter registration and postal voting applicable to different parts of the territory. In the case under study, the different requirements for electors to register and to vote by post, and, in this way, the different requisites for the citizens to exercise the right to vote are based on a territorial criterion. Electors living in different places of the United Kingdom must observe different standards for voting in the same parliamentary election. In the case of Northern Ireland, the electoral system has been tailored to adapt to historical circumstances: political conflicts within Northern Ireland; social perception of electoral fraud as a significant problem inside this territory; distrust of the system of absent voting; and problems of persistent fraud and lack of transparency in past elections.
