Leader: Will we ever e-vote?

Much has been made of the UK electorate's apathy, which is predicted to lead to another low voter turnout in today's General Election.

One tool that could potentially go some way to addressing that problem is electronic voting - that's voting over the internet, by mobile phone or digital TV etc as opposed to electronic voting and counting machines in polling stations.

Despite trials of various e-voting methods during some local elections in 2003, the technology won't be ready to use on a national scale until the General Election after this one - after the government has carried out a UK-wide pilot.

But even if those trials go to plan - and that's no small assumption given the government's record on large IT projects - there are significant cultural barriers e-voting will have to overcome.

On the one hand one of the drivers for multi-channel e-voting is the convenience argument - with people leading increasingly busy lives they would be more likely to vote if they didn't have to trail to a polling station but could do it through their TV or by text message.

On the other hand the growing scale of postal vote fraud that is being uncovered around the country may actually drive people back to the relative security and comfort of the polling booth. Given the amount of phishing scams and viruses that target - with some success - online banking customers, how confident would people actually be about the integrity of an election result based on something as remote and unsupervised as internet and text message votes?

That's an issue the politicians and technology industry will have to work together to overcome. This is one system where no-one can afford to have any kind of security breach or corruption, as it would immediately destroy the credibility and integrity of the democratic electoral process.

An area where technology is likely to be of more immediate use is in the electronic registering and counting of votes. This was used in some parts of the US in the most recent Presidential Election, while European countries such as Belgium are able to get election results within minutes instead of hours.

But then again, isn't staying up through the night and watching Peter Snow and his 'swingometer' half the fun of General Elections?

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