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Labour will campaign this weekend over claims that millions of people are missing from the electoral register.

The government has brought forward a plan to switch voters from "household" to "individual" registration.

Labour says this will mean a disproportionately high number of its supporters will end up being left off the new rolls.

The Cabinet Office said the new deadline was simply to ensure voting was as fraud-free as possible.

However, Labour said the move was a "cynical attempt to rig the system".

It says private renters, ethnic minority voters and young people are among the most likely not to have been transferred to the new system.

'Underrepresented'

People must now register to vote individually rather than one member of a household filling in a form.

Party leader Jeremy Corbyn will speak at a rally in Leicester, addressing students - who some claim are most at risk of disenfranchisement.

Labour says that by ending the transition a year earlier than the original December 2016 deadline, the Conservatives are guilty of "gerrymandering" before next summer's Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and London mayoral elections.

Labour peer Lord Falconer told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the situation was "very bad".

"The consequence of this is going to be that you're going to find, for example, in inner city constituencies, or constituencies with big representations of black, minority ethnic groups, they are going to be underrepresented in Parliament," he said.

Lords debate

John Penrose, minister for constitutional reform, said the government had been carrying out checks for 18 months and everyone who was not on the register had been contacted nine times.

"Every single genuine elector who's out there will have been confirmed and put on the register," he said.

"The only ones therefore taken off will be people who've either moved house, or died or in some cases never existed, because they were put on the register fraudulently."

It made sense to "clean up register", he added.

The Electoral Commission is recommending that peers vote against the timetable change when it is debated in the Lords on Tuesday because it fears people will be disenfranchised.

This could spell defeat for the government which has no majority in the upper house.

Officials said anyone who disappears from the register would still still be able to apply for a vote until two weeks before the elections.

The new system of voters having to register individually has been rolling out across England, Wales and Scotland since last year.

To ease the transition to the new system, nobody has been taken off existing electoral registers - but anyone who has not individually registered by 1 December will be removed.