4 August 2003

Does the UK need E-Voting?

	Richard Allan MP
	There is no doubt that remote electronic voting offers a convenience that would be appreciated by many people. I am pleased that the report of the Electoral Commission makes it clear that we should not link e-voting to turnout. There has been too much hype around e-voting in the past as somehow of itself turning people on to politics as usual. But we do need to weigh up the benefits of this added convenience against the costs of the new systems and the potential risks they pose to confidence in the election results. The pilots to date have been very expensive and not always well managed. Worse still, there is no evidence yet that open audit trails have been implemented that would allow all the participants in an electronic election to verify the results. Until this has been done then we face the risk of the worst possible outcome for an election, a contested result where the election system itself cannot be publicly shown to be sound.
	Stephen Coleman, Professor of e-Democracy, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
	I have two different (but consistent) responses to this evaluation. Firstly, I remain a sceptical supporter of e-voting experimentation. I agree with the Electoral Commission's call for accreditation of e-voting systems and would add to that a call for greater rigour and transparency in the design and articulation of standards. I think that the Commission has rather under-stated the failures of project management in some of the 2003 pilots and is right to propose that local authorities, and particularly Returning Officers, must play a more central, hands-on role in the management of e-voting. My second response is to yawn. I can hear people up and down the country, if they bothered to read this report, asking, 'So, is that it? Is this the great new era of interactive democracy?' It is staggeringly unimaginative that no connection has been made so far - or is being proposed for future pilots - between e-voting and e-participation. Does anyone really believe that e-voting, as a mechanistic process, will in any way increase turnout or voters' enthusiasm? Is it not quite obvious that there is an intimate relationship between what happens in between elections and the extent to which citizens consider it worthwhile to vote? The Electoral Commission does not only exist to supervise elections. It has a specific remit to boost public interest in the democratic process. An opportunity to do this has been squandered in the pilots that have been run so far. I want to see innovative future pilots which link the participatory and educative elements of e-politics with the procedural testing of e-voting.
	Alex Folkes, Electoral Reform Society
	Does the UK need e-voting? In short, no. E-voting is at the luxury end of the scale and we view it as tinkering around the edges of democracy. The Electoral Commission's report has confirmed that e-voting has the technical capacity to work and it makes voting more convenient for some people. However, they also confirm that it has not shown any ability to significantly raise turnout levels, the reason for the pilots in the first place. We would like to see the Government moving ahead with pilots which encourage people to vote by making voting more worthwhile or comprehension greater - we want to see more information pilots and pilots of systems of proportional representation.
	Yoz Grahame, FaxYourMP.com
	At FaxYourMP.com, we have been involved in enabling citizens to participate electronically in our democracy since 1998. We applaud the steps the Commission is taking to give electronic voting a fair trial, its positive attitude towards the scheme and at the same time its caution to ensure that the UK does not rush headlong into a high-tech disaster. However, we still have a large degree of concern with the scheme: Partially with the countless potential security pitfalls, but also regarding the effectiveness of the scheme to increase voter turnout in comparison with other less costly, more innovative ideas to encourage wider democratic participation. Caution with regard to security is vital: the USA's plans for e-voting have met with scorn from a wide range of security experts, all of whom seem to have gone unheeded. Take Bruce Schneier, possibly the world's most reknowned authority on computer security: "Building a secure Internet-based voting system is a very hard problem, harder than all the other computer security problems we've attempted and failed at. I believe that the risks to democracy are too great to attempt it." (Taken from a larger piece here.) The utmost care must be taken to ensure that the electoral nightmare of Florida 2000 could not happen here. Overall, however, we strongly concur with Dr Coleman's points above. If the Commission's overall aim is to encourage wider democratic participation, then the huge financial and organisational cost of electronic voting would be far better spent on conquering voter apathy by making government, Parliament and its processes more accessible to citizens. Closing the wide gap between government and the people will do far more to raise turnouts and encourage meaningful participation than another method of voting.
	Dr N. Ben Fairweather, Research Fellow, Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility
	If properly implemented, there are definite advantages in using e-voting 1) to allow people to vote securely and in secret from places other than their local polling station and 2) for disabled people with impairments that make marking a cross in the appropriate place on a ballot paper difficult, e-voting can enable voting on equal terms with other people (this includes voters with visual impairments and motor control impairments). However, as things stand, e-voting (or postal voting) from home does not secure for individual voters the secrecy or security of their vote that the UK is obliged to provide under its treaty obligations and it is wildly implausible that it will do in the near future. On top of this, e-voting looks likely to make our elections less fair, by making voting easier for the wealthier people who can afford home computers and internet access, without doing anything significant to make voting easier for those who cannot. My first paragraph said 'if properly implemented', and that is no small 'if'. While there have been 'pilots' of e-voting, at present the methods that might eventually enable people to vote securely and in secret are prohibitively difficult for many disabled people to use (as well as many older voters). Equally, the pilots that show promise in enabling universal access fall so far short of allowing secure and secret voting that it is implausible that they could be adapted to achieve it. To make matters worse, if universal postal voting becomes the norm for most elections in England (as the Electoral Commission is now proposing), the supervised locations (polling stations) that might be used to enable people to vote electronically in a secure and secret way will no longer exist for most elections.
	Jason Kitcat, founder of the Free e-Democracy Project
	While I welcome much of what the report has said about all the pilots and many of the proposals are sensible, the fundamental issues remain unresolved. The systems are unverifiable by voters, candidates and returning officers. The costs of running electronic votes remain astronomical. The report notes the project management and procurement failings throughout the pilots and does not reassure that the government will be any better at managing IT projects in the future. Furthermore the report also notes that the requirements set forth for the e-voting systems had no formal mechanism for making sure they were adhered to - and indeed they weren't. Things did go wrong and there's no way of being sure that fraud didn't occur. Technology provides a barrier to truly understanding what happens in elections and should be avoided. This report does not assuage these doubts, though I am encouraged by the greater level of analysis being given to the e-voting security issues by the Electoral Commission.
	Peter Facey, Director of the New Politics Network and a member of the Independent Commission on Alternative Voting Methods which reported in 2002
	I welcome the cautious approach of the Electoral Commission recommendations on electronic remote voting. I believe it does provide to some voters an improvement in access, but as of today there is no evidence that it will provide a increase in turnout. If this is the main target, then as the Commission pointed out the main route for now should be moves to all postal elections. This does not mean that work on forms of electronic remote voting should be stopped. They potentially provide at the very least another string to the bow and in the long term they should replace postal voting. But we are not there yet, we need to improve security, ensure that a technology gap does not reduce access to poorer sections of society, and build confidence with politicians and voters alike. Where internet or remote electronic voting could add a real bonus is in providing voters with more information about candidates and the election they are being asked to participate in. At a time when many voters in local elections do not receive any information from candidates this good help improve the quality of our democratic process and not just simply ensure that more people take part. This is area where I would like to see some greater concentration, so that e-voting helps improve the quality of the democracy and does not simply replace the pencil as the mechanism by which we vote.
	John Stevens, E-Democracy Programme Manager, BT
	"Yes" - that's the response from the voters who participated in the last two years of successful e-voting pilots. In St Albans, for instance, over 40% of those who voted in May used one of the e-voting channels - internet, telephone and text messaging. In Sheffield over 20% of the e-voters used text messaging. The voters who chose to e-vote were attracted by the choice and convenience of e-voting - and they had confidence that their vote would count as much as if they had gone to a polling station. The e-voting programme must be seen as a part of a wider e-democracy agenda - including e-consultation, e-referenda and so on - which sits alongside traditional methods. We welcome the further investment by Government in these broader and 'softer' areas of democracy. The BT consortium, which includes election.com, Electoral Reform Services and Oracle, is committed to supporting electoral modernisation and other initiatives which use new technologies and processes to support an increase in democratic participation. There is a role for all of the stakeholders - including the voters, candidates, electoral teams - in shaping the future of elections. The issues of inter-operability , security, scalability and accessibility are all well understood and are being addressed through close cooperation between the interested parties. It should be remembered that this is a pilot programme. The technologies and processes involved will change as we work towards of the goal of an e-enabled general election.
	Louise Ferguson, user experience consultant and council member of the UK Usability Professionals' Association
	I concur with the Electoral Commission's findings. It's still early days for electronic voting, and the Commission is right to urge caution - as the Commission states, e-voting entails integrating paper and electronic systems, so both parts need to be right. The turnout increases were slight, in any case. [I'd point to the Hawthorne effect here, too.] Telephone and Internet voting proved to be the most popular e-voting channels (MORI survey): this supports current research findings among UK local authority residents, who often prefer to interact by phone. Much of the user experience research to date into kiosks and iDTV has thrown up significant user issues, so the Commission's findings in this area are nothing new. The report highlights lack of project management and training in the e-voting pilots - both classic failures in technology projects. Just as disturbing was the revelation that many local authorities had left all kinds of checks and balances - including those for technical security requirements - up to system suppliers. It's depressing to keep seeing the same patterns of behaviour, but good to see that such failures are being reported. I'm concerned at the lack of research into the design of e-voting systems, whether Internet, telephone, kiosk or any other. Achieving ease of use - for both election officers and voters - is not about using a particular technology, it's about good design: designing sensible processes, system navigation, consistent and familiar terminology, page layouts, system interfaces and so on - and that needs to be planned for rather than assumed. We know little about the user experience of voting and what affects it, here or in any other country. So-called IT projects are really projects involving people and technology, and the public sector needs to take responsibility for 'all' aspects of systems that, after all, provide the infrastructure for our democracy.
	Malcolm Dumper, Executive Director - Policy & External Affairs, Association of Electoral Administrators (AEA)
	The AEA strongly supports the programme to modernise electoral law. Most if not all of the pilot schemes that have been run have had some measure of success. All out postal voting has indeed since significant increases in turnout. Electronic voting is though the great enigma. In this technological age it is proper to explore and encourage greater use of IT in most forms of service delivery. The ability to cast a vote through a variety of channels ie;- telephone, internet , digital TV etc is instantly attractive and would appear to offer a multitude of choices. Such facilities should also overcome constraints associated with the current voting process and engage more with the younger voters (18-25 year olds) who consistently record low participation levels at elections. To date however the pilot schemes have been too narrow in so much as they are driven by the technology rather than the desire to be entirely flexible and reactive to the needs of voters. There is also a major concern amongst Returning Officers that control of the election process is effectively taken over by IT specialists. Government must though continue to press ahead with alternative voting processes and enable members of the public to not only vote at elections by a variety of convenient methods but to contribute to other issues such as Council debates, local referenda etc. by appropriate technological means.