A few months ago, the government published a consultation document on e-democracy that identified 2006 as the first possible general election that might involve electronic voting (e-voting) of some kind. Various "new media" voting mechanisms were experimented with in the local elections earlier this year and they did, in some areas, increase turnout.
Although, interestingly, nothing like as much as all-postal voting did. All-postal areas had a turnout of 47%, against the national average of 33% and 39% across all pilot schemes. Some might argue that people who can't be bothered to stop in at the polling station but will dash for an SMS on the train ought not to be deciding our futures, but if I could vote on the TV without having to get out of my chair, then I'm sure I would.
One way to e-vote would be using some sort of government ID application. This might be loaded into your mobile phone SIM or on to your government ID card. Not that this is likely soon. In the mid-1990s, the UK government was conducting 22 departmental investigations into smart cards but nothing happened, and the barriers have since been compounded by the requirements for strong authentication because of transactional applications (of which e-voting is only one). But let's suppose you could take your e-government card and stick it in your TV to vote, and let's suppose the system was constructed to provide some appropriate form of conditional anonymity. Is this a good idea?
It may well be, but there are a number of problems that need to be addressed up front to make this kind of thing a reality. Two of the most interesting are: first, can we actually trust the technology needed to deliver e-voting (especially in the timescales proposed) and, second, "vote harvesting". The first of these is about accountability and auditability. If you vote electronically, how are you to know the election was fair, that your vote wasn't disclosed to third parties and so on? It is this aspect that concerns IT people the most. Voting systems would have to be open for inspection (perhaps even open source) and scrupulously examined. In fact, it is possible to devise clever cryptographic techniques that make e-votes better than physical ones. Imagine being able to log on from your PC and check that your vote had been counted correctly, safe in the knowledge that it was mathematically impossible for anyone else to know it was your vote.
On to vote harvesting. In the recent German election, voters were selling their postal votes on eBay, offering to vote for particular parties in return for employment or money. It would be difficult for some organised group to accompany voters into polling booths and hand them £5 if they voted appropriately but it might be a different story online, especially if the e-votes were transferable (so that proxies could vote for people who were sick, old or computerphobic). You might argue that the internet could provide a transparent and efficient market for votes that would be much more open than our existing system. Instead of a party saying "vote for us and we'll give you a tax cut", they could just give you the money up front.
If the technology did work, though, and it was relatively inexpensive, then why would it only be used once every five years for general elections with maybe the odd local election in between? Surely, the marginal cost of running additional referenda and of making more public sector posts directly accountable (why shouldn't council tax payers vote on who is going to be chief of police?) would make this attractive and the technology might then have significant implications.
So, when you get an email from the local council announcing there is going to be a vote about building a new housing estate nearby, then the residents would be able to decide whether to sell their vote and take the money in compensation for inconvenience and fall in house price, or whether to band together with other residents and buy votes themselves to defeat the developer.
But e-voting and new media might conspire to bypass traditional democratic structures altogether (and I don't mean smashing up Starbucks). If you combine the UK's experience in mobile voting (for Big Brother) with the latest US idea - Fox's cable network is creating a new show American Candidate to allow TV viewers to vote for a "peoples' candidate" for president, who will be funded by the TV company to run in the 2004 presidential campaign - you have the perfect model for electronic democracy in the UK.
