Go online and you can choose your ideal London mayor in fantasy mayoral games or even join a poll on what sex Cherie and Tony Blair's baby should be, and who your favourite member of Steps is. But, in Britain, actual online voting remains a fantasy.
Nevertheless, the government's grandiose gestures towards developing "e-government" are being backed by several important experiments next Thursday, which could encourage a move to real online voting.
For the first time in Britain, electronic voting and counting will be introduced in several local elections, including Bury and Salford, as part of a series of pilot schemes permitted by the government's new Representation of the People Act. Eighty electronic polling stations will also be installed in all the wards in Stratford on Avon's district council elections, allowing the electorate to vote via a key-pad, with a reassuringly similar layout to a traditional ballot paper.
In London's mayoral election, Milton Keynes-based firm DRS Data & Research Services will count the ballot electronically, having successfully established electronic counts in proportional representation elections in Norway and Bosnia.
The reason for adopting the electronic system in the mayoral election is purely pragmatic, says a Department of the Environment spokeswoman. With four different votes and a complex PR system, calculating it manually would have taken days.
"People are used to having a result the next morning - and they'll have one," she says.
If the results are delivered without a hitch by early morning, it will add credibility to the electronic experiment. For, while this electronic tinkering hardly sounds momentous, Britain's electoral etiquette has hardly changed in 100 years.
The Electoral Reform Society (ERS) is pleased the government is edging forward slowly. "We welcome the pilots. It is something we've been advocating for years," says Keith Hathaway, chairman of ERS's electronic voting commission.
The US got there first. Politicians turned to the net after grappling with the problem of encouraging political participation - in 1996, only 49.08% of the electorate voted in the presidential election, with time constraints the single biggest reason Americans didn't vote.
In January, Alaskan Republicans could cast their votes for the presidential primaries online through VoteHere.net. But despite the obvious benefits of internet voting in remote areas, just 35 of the 4,500 voters chose the online option.
The reaction has not been as lukewarm elsewhere. In March, Democratic primary elections held on the internet in Arizona increased turnout by 622%. There were some technical hitches as Election.com's servers crashed, and the Voting Integrity Project unsuccessfully tried to get an injunction against the process on the grounds that it excluded minorities and the poor. But Dogonvillage.com, a grassroots internet community for connecting black people, claims that in areas where its "digital hit squad" targeted black voters, turnout rose by more than 1,000%.
The Arizona election was conducted on PCs. Entranet, a small British company, recently demonstrated an online voting system to the British government's IT unit, which works across platforms, with voting via digital interactive TV, Wap (wireless application protocol) phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants).
Entranet has designed and built secure online transaction systems for the Co-operative Bank and the Woolwich. Its chief technology officer Dharmesh Mistry claims its pin and user name voting system is "more secure than a ballot card". It also ensures the information flow is one-way, so no big brother can tell who voted for who.
The security problems of online voting are "not insurmountable" says ERS's Alex Folkes. He favours an intranet system of online voting, linking up electronic polling stations on an internal computer network, rather than a genuinely "online" voting system which people can access anywhere. Electronic polling stations linked on an intranet could produce a quick result and would enable booths to be easily moved to more voter-friendly locations, such as supermarkets.
But he worries that unsupervised online voting could compromise the democratic principle of a secret ballot. "At the moment only one person is allowed into polling booths except in very special circumstances, safeguarding people from coercion. Online, who knows how many people are telling the person who is actually voting how to vote?"
Mistry accepts that online voting places "a responsibility on the voter to vote secretly", but argues it is the same as a cashpoint. "You wouldn't show people your pin number. You take that responsibility with cash and you should do the same with information."
He also claims that online voting could increase access. Voting through the TV could help housebound old people and the disabled vote, while Entranet also demonstrated electronic translation technology that would enhance the participation of people whose first language is not English.
Online voting has a wide application, for shareholders and trade unions as well as citizens. The government's step-by-step approach gets the approval of the ERS, as it helps increase internet access for the "information poor".
As Foulks says: "I don't think we are going to get a wonderful all-singing all-dancing online election yet, especially as less than one in five currently have internet access."
