This article examines the reconfiguration of British enfranchised citizenship through the Elections Act 2022. It challenges linear narratives of democratic expansion by proposing a conceptual framework of gap governance that identifies a tripartite structure of citizenship consisting of legal status, enfranchised membership, and capable political agency. This article argues that the state manages inclusion and exclusion by selectively aligning or disaligning these dimensions across racially and socioeconomically differentiated populations. While the Act expands the franchise to the overseas diaspora, framing them as a permanent British family, it simultaneously introduces mandatory voter identification for domestic populations. This shift relocates the primary boundary of the demos from the formal allocation of rights to the regulation of administrative capacity. Yet the two populations upon which these provisions operate are not equivalent. The racialised and classed distribution of documentary resources ensures that expansion and restriction fall asymmetrically across the demos. The resulting emergence of the Verifiable Citizen reflects a governing rationality in which political agency is conditioned upon procedural compliance and administrative legibility, and in which exclusion is recast as a neutral consequence of individual non-compliance rather than recognised as a structural act of boundary-drawing.
Seongjo Kim (Sun,) studied this question.