ED MILIBAND is absolutely right to highlight Britain’s million missing voters as we approach an election with life-changing consequences for us all.

Rushed changes to electoral rules ending registration by household and the block registration of university students have seen the number of registered voters drop alarmingly.

There were flaws to the old system. Those responsible for filling in the register could leave members of their household off, for example.

Individual registration is supposedly designed to address these problems.

But changes that could disenfranchise up to a million of us if we fail to re-register should have been publicised by the government.

Adverts should have been run on television and in the press, explaining the rule changes and how to ensure people don’t lose their vote.

The government has instead been strangely quiet on the issue.

This newspaper’s columnist Derek Wall put it well: “It’s almost as if David Cameron wanted fewer people to vote.”

This is the truth of the matter. Low turnout has always disproportionately benefited the Tories.

Disadvantaged households and people living in poverty are less likely to vote than others.

Partly this is Labour’s fault — if the party had more to offer the most vulnerable, they would be more likely to make an effort to support it, but too often it seems that no party is interested in their plight.

But poor people are far more likely to vote Labour than Conservative, and so the fewer of them show up at the polling booth the better from the Tory point of view.

And, as Miliband pointed out yesterday, the bulk of the “missing million” dropped from the electoral register in the past year are young people, especially students whose colleges will no longer register them.

There are good reasons why the government might not want these people to vote — reasons Miliband flagged up by his choice of venue for yesterday’s speech, Sheffield Hallam University.

This is the heart of Nick Clegg’s constituency and you can bet students haven’t forgotten the betrayal of the man who promised to vote against any increase in tuition fees, only to raise them to a staggering £9,000 a year.

Both universities in Sheffield have helped their students to register, so Clegg may find his hopes to avoid their revenge are dashed.

Aside from students, young people are more likely to be missed off the register because they move house more often than older people and are more likely to live in rented accommodation.

Polls suggest 18 to 25-year-olds are more likely to vote for the left than older people, providing Cameron and Clegg with another incentive to shut them out.

They cannot be allowed to get away with it. Britain’s young people face a bleak future if the Tories are allowed back into No 10.

Saddled with debts many cannot hope to repay, they enter a brave new world of zero-hours contracts, poverty pay, curtailed union rights, broken public services and unaffordable housing.

They will be expected to pay more for longer into pensions that pay out less. They will live with the unpredictable consequences of global warming as the “greenest government ever” keeps fracking under our homes and appointing climate-change deniers to run its environmental policies.

Of course, this roll-call of doom will affect all Britain’s people, not just the young.

But that’s what makes defeating the Tories in 2015 so important — and Labour’s efforts to ensure everyone in Britain has a voice so vital.