General election: Half a million in late rush to register to vote

Nearly half a million people took advantage of their last chance to register to vote before next month's UK general election, setting a new daily record.

Almost a third of the 485,057 people who registered on Monday were young voters, with 137,000 in the 16-24 age bracket and 152,000 in the 25-34 age bracket, according to the Cabinet Office.

This is the first general election since online registration was introduced last year. Of Monday's total, 469,057 applied online and 16,000 on paper.

More than 800,000 voters disappeared from the electoral roll in 2014 following the introduction of individual registration. Previously, voters could be registered by a head of household.

However, according to the Electoral Commission, it is still uncertain if the surge before the deadline is sufficient to make up for the missing voters.

Many may have already been registered and forgotten or could be registered elsewhere.

As it will take councils several days to assemble their electoral rolls, it might not be known until after the general election what has happened to the number of registered voters.

Many also registered in the days running up to the deadline, with 118,505 on Thursday, 104,403 on Friday, 66,986 on Saturday and 124,284 on Sunday.

In total, just under a million people registered in the week before the deadline, 95 per cent of them online.

Alex Robertson of the Electoral Commission said it was "absolutely fantastic" that more than 2m people had applied to register to vote during the past few weeks.

"On the day of the deadline we saw almost half a million people apply to register in just one day, the busiest day since the introduction of the new online system," he said.

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