Government Computing have reported that Wolverhampton City Council will encourage text message voting in this April’s City Youth Election.

Mel Potter, promotion and publicity officer at the Wolverhampton City Council’s Youth Division, said: “Huge numbers of young people already have mobile phones, and we hope that by offering the option of voting by text many more of them will take part.”

The council will use the e-txt system from Dynmark, which operates like Microsoft Outlook. The system sorts texts into a folder for each candidate, which eliminates the need for counting and provides an ongoing tally. “Because we can sort the messages by which number they came from, we can easily identify attempts at multiple voting,” added Ms Potter. It is hoped that that the move will also reduce costs.

If successful the council will extend the scheme to the United Kingdom Youth Parliament elections, which are organised by local authorities with no funding from central government.

Online voting for the Wolverhampton City Youth Council elections were introduced in 2003 to supplement voting by ballot box. The council plans to release the election telephone number for texting votes in the next few weeks. Such efforts are commendable, though it will be interesting to dicover whether they actually increases voter turn out.