SciTech
Two skinny lattes and a vote, please
Published 04 December 2006
E-voting could make casting a ballot as easy as buying a coffee. Becky Hogge has reservations
How much of your Christmas shopping will you do online this year? During the first dotcom boom, many web commerce companies were destroyed by consumers' reluctance to shop on the net. Although some of this can be put down to poor experiences with early e-commerce sites, much of it was caused by worries about sending credit-card details over the internet.
These days, most of us are happy to type in our card numbers. Not much remains to stop us making all our Yuletide preparations in our pyjamas. Over the past five years we have come to accept that buying online is both convenient and safe. But as more aspects of our daily lives move into the electronic sphere, we would do well to maintain a healthy scepticism.
In October, the Department for Constitutional Affairs announced plans for a series of e-voting pilot trials during the May 2007 local elections, and invited councils to submit proposals. Although the Birmingham postal vote fiasco sufficed to exclude postal balloting from the pilot projects (along with SMS and digital TV schemes), local councils were invited to experiment with remote internet voting, as well as the use of electronic voting and counting machines inside polling stations.
The democracy minister, Bridget Prentice, urged them to "make sure that people can vote when they want and how they want", noting that "young people are using the internet in [their] daily lives". The phrase "young people" suggests her aim - to raise election turnout among Britain's disillusioned youth. But is making voting as easy as buying a latte the answer?
Many civic-minded techies think not. One such is Jason Kitcat, who co-ordinates the UK e-voting campaign for the Open Rights Group. "It's not obvious that e-voting is very different from e-commerce, and that's the mistake ministers make," he says. In fact, e-voting presents several technical challenges that could expose the system to fraud.
Unlike credit-card companies, which verify a customer's identity offline during the issuing process, electoral officials must not only ensure that the voters are who they say they are, but that each votes only once. This is complicated by the requirement that voters' choices be kept secret, so any data used during identification must be obscured while voting. And all e-voting mechanisms must produce reliable records for recounts.
From last month's US elections, where the reliability of voting machines was questioned in several states, to schemes in Canada, the Netherlands, Ireland and Japan, the future of e-voting is in doubt. Kitcat feels that the month between the DCA's announcement and the deadline for councils to submit proposals left little time for public consultation. It seems that the only option left to those in the 2007 pilot trials who don't want to vote electronically is to vote with their feet.
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