Profiling at polling stations

Buried deep in the article linked below is an interesting tidbit, polling stations in Sheffield Hallam forced student voters into a second queue to prioritise other voters. My guess is the argument used was that a lot of students had not brought their polling cards, something mentioned every twenty minutes or so during the BBC's election night coverage, but it's very hard not to see this as profiling.

The student electorate tends Liberal more than pretty much any other group and in Sheffield Hallam, Nick Clegg's seat, it must have come out in force. Contrary to the approach taken here, the right to vote is supposed to be universal. I can understand asking voters without polling cards to join a second queue, it takes longer to process a voter without the card, but that isn't what happened. A demographic group was singled out basically told that they weren't going to get to vote whether they had their polling card or not.

It's not as if Clegg was likely to lose his seat but these minor inequalities are indicative of the system as a whole.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8666338.stm