8 July 2002

E-Voting

By Margaret Moran MP

"Politics is Pants" was one young voters reaction to the local elections that I got whilst out canvassing. It was not an untypical reaction. But will e-Voting overcome the perception that politics is boring, divisive and dominated by middle age men in suits? Will it lead to resurgence in involvement in politics? Faced with the choice of the stubby pencil on string and voting by pc or mobile phone will the gizmo win?

According to a recent survey, it is a popular option. Almost 9 out of 10 members of the British public said they would be more inspired by politics if they could vote from their PC's. The survey by e-provider Touch found that 87% of those polled would welcome the option to vote online in the next general election via their home or work PC. Three quarters said they would be more likely to vote at local or general elections. But 70% also said safeguards are necessary to ensure data gathered from online voting was not made available to government departments or third parties

Altogether in the local elections there were 30 pilots - 7 of these used electronic means; 2 of these had electronic voting till the close of polls on Thursday. SMS voting was used in Sheffield and Liverpool while in other places, kiosks in the street were used and some polling stations had electronic voting instead of paper and pencil. £4 million was made available via DTLR to 15 councils to run e-Voting pilots. The largest single grant going to St Albans (£1m) for systems enabling residents to vote online from home or council run information kiosks.

All of the schemes - with the exception of Newham - raised participation levels. The convenience and novelty certainly increased turnout among those who normally wouldn't vote. In three wards, one being Sheffield Hallam, there was a marked raise of 8%, (compared to the overall rise of 4%)

Technology in polling booths for quicker voting was the most expensive method and does not appear to have noticeably increased turnout. Certainly it did not make any difference to voting in Newham. Text /SMS using mobile phones was popular with the people in Liverpool and Manchester and appears to work best in " poorer" areas where there is a high % of pay as you go mobile phone use and a high percentage of young people. In Everton, Liverpool, of the number that voted last year, 60% voted electronically, using the Internet and SMS - though Internet was dominant. Kiosks these were surprisingly popular with older people once they were shown how to use them.

Of the Internet voting systems, the use of pc voting was the most straightforward. The processes are the same as the traditional system - with a registration number on the polling card. Dialogue on the Internet was run from central server run by BT, though different companies fronted it. A registration number is required to get on the site. An online ballot paper is completed in the usual way. Failure to mark the paper having sent it triggers a prompt to check you are registering a no vote. The system does not allow voting by several methods; for example you could not go straight to the polling station and try to vote there; clerks check a central database that would record whether or not you had voted online.

Undoubtedly SMS was popular particularly among the young. This raises issues about how we can communicate with this group, by which I do not mean messages like Labour's RUup4IT used in the general election, but opportunities for creation of online communities of young people; projects like Knowsleys want2Lrn which spread by word of mouth & text in an area where over 90% of young people own phone. A recent MoRI poll found 73% of 18 to 24 year olds would vote if they could do it via their mobile.

In theory, e-Voting, particularly SMS and PC based, offers more opportunities to participate at times convenient to citizens and reflect an increasingly mobile and time constrained population. But the technology was not always as responsive as advertised. SMS can be subject to delays, dependent on the texts going back and forth. In Sheffield, there was one report of it taking 4 hours to register a vote. Legend has it that in some areas, whenever piece of kit failed to work, citizens were being jumped on by an army of Americans to fix it, so great was there enthusiasm to jump on what they see as a lucrative bandwagon. Many pilots worked well because they were heavily supported - but how would this work on a nationwide scale?

In Sheffield and Liverpool, the online site was open for 7 or 8 days before closing on polling day. In St Albans, online polling closed 4/5 days before election day. This does have implications for the " normal"" cycle of the election period and there is the view that a system that doesn't open much before polling day and closes that night, may be most effective.

I believe e-Voting initiatives need to be linked to greater opportunities for information and political education. A MoRI survey after the general election found that voter apathy was not due to a total lack of interest but a lack of information from the candidates. Tackling that need via the technology will be a more significant improvement in democratic participation than simply gismos. Sadly, in these pilots there was no facility for candidate's election addresses to be linked to the site to help inform voting decisions.

There are concerns surrounding trust and privacy. Is there a greater danger, if voting at home, of threat or intimidation, than at the polls? Of course the same arguments apply to postal voting. Measures were built in to tackle security and identity issues. With the Internet pilots and SMS, every voter had pin numbers on their card that they could activate.

On text, the process involved sending your number; a message came back asking you for your preference for candidates. The personal pin number acts as verification, voters then send their preference by text and receive an acknowledgement. Measures are being taken to enhance security- one company is putting voting chips in their phones. Again similar issues arise as in postal voting.

And what are the prospects of hacking? And what would be the penalty? Whilst the E-envoys office are relatively sanguine about hackers, the prospect of forcing a rerun or undermining the credibility of a general election would make hanging look like a picnic in the park.

The Electoral Commission and the DTLR are producing a report on responses to e-Voting. However, the E-envoy has indicated that legislative hurdles may make full-scale online elections in the UK impossible before 2006.

So is e-Voting a success or failure? Well some e-Voting, particularly PC based, will undoubtedly remain with us but a major leap forward in democratic involvement?

Unequivocally no. I believe we can fight voter apathy using e-Democracy, but the real key is using technology to engage with citizens and link people to politics at local & national level in an ongoing dialogue to involve and inform our legislative and policy making processes. That is why I am pushing for an investigation as to how we can use e-Democracy to make a real improvement in the way Parliament and politics is perceived; via the Information Select Committee, of which I am a member, and the establishment last week, of the E-Democracy All Party Parliamentary Group. As we learnt from Womenspeak, the first ever online, interactive project which I initiated between MP's of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Domestic Violence and survivors of domestic violence, we can engage in ongoing interaction to inform and increase the credibility of politics in a more fundamental way which can inform and change the legislation. This was a unique attempt to get the voices and direct experience of women into the heart of Parliament; and to test the use of new information and communication technologies to see how far they can be used to invigorate the democratic process. As I indicated in my report" E Democracy or He Democracy", published by the Fawcett Society last week, we need a more fundamental and ongoing dialogue with the electorate, and especially with women who are particularly switched off by politics. For them politics is pants in every sense.

Margaret Moran MP is Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Department for Work and Pensions, Chair of the All Party Parliamentary E-Democracy Group and a Member of the House of Commons Information Select Committee.

http://www.margaretmoran.org