Power to the people

There are times in the wake of some ghastly crime when it seems that, if the Great British Public had its way, murderers would be hanged, thieves flogged, rapists castrated and child molesters garrotted or worse.

Polls frequently show public views to be way out of kilter with those of the people elected to represent them. Most people are in the happy position of being able to make political judgements without taking responsibility for the consequences. Governments can't, and the decisions they make are routinely an uneasy compromise and often a choice of evils.

The very imperfection of our democracy in reflecting the 'will of the people' is thus a kind of safeguard. Governments may occasionally allow policy to be dictated by tabloid headlines, but a natural inertia in the system generally allows time for cooler judgements to reign.

Electronic democracy
So what is going to happen when democracy is mediated electronically? There is no technical reason why everyone should not be able to vote instantaneously on every issue of the day. The Government, which is looking to promote some form of what it calls e-democracy, does not plan to go as far as that.

However, the web has a habit of changing everything it touches in ways that are not always predictable, and democracy is unlikely to prove an exception.

To its credit, the Government is seeking your views in a consultation paper called In the Service of Democracy. This takes a twin-track approach, addressing what it calls e-participation and e-voting as separate issues.

E-voting via the internet is expected to come in as soon as 2006 and is seen as a way of increasing the poll count. However, an Electoral Commission report on trials in 30 local council polls, held in May, concluded that the new technology had no significant impact on the number of people voting, although turnout was up overall. It also said that e-voting in a UK general election was unlikely to happen before 2010.

The mechanisms of e-voting are relatively straightforward, with security being the major issue. There seems no reason why it should be more prone to plausible fiddling than crosses on paper (or the famous Bush chads), although people will undoubtedly try.

But the distinction between e-voting and e-participation (involving people in the wider democratic process) could blur when the electronic systems are in place. An obvious way to get people involved is to poll their opinions, and an e-voting system would be able to cope as easily with 10 million opinions as it would with one.

A poll of that size then starts to look like a referendum, because politicians cannot ignore it. So we could edge from a representative to a more direct democracy, without actually planning to.

James Crabtree, of The Work Foundation think tank (formerly the Industrial Society), believes this process will be pushed forward, not by MPs but by a rich campaigner staging a referendum "as a stick to beat the Government with".

Councils, too, would be tempted to run local referenda on just about any issue as, particularly in urban areas, they are detached from residents and get little credit for what they do.

Lowering the voting barriers
MPs would get in on the act once they saw how easy referenda are to stage. There would be a tendency to hold a referendum as a way of promoting a particular policy provided, of course, that a 'yes' vote could be expected.

"All this would lower the barriers to certain types of participation, opening up the possibility of a more direct, plebiscitary style of government," said Crabtree.

But he stressed that the government paper is not radical enough. Ministers "want things to stay much as they are, with some electronic bits stuck on ... a sort of Elastoplast for sickly politics", he explained.

Electronic systems can be more flexible than traditional democratic structures and we should at least consider the possibilities. Elections could be more frequent, for instance once a year, as suggested by the 19th century Chartist movement, rather than once every four years.

Constituencies could be formed from common interests rather than the accident of living in the same area. "You could have an MP for the aerospace industry, or an MP for extraordinarily rich people ... groups who have more in common than, say, people in Islington, London, which has a mix of very poor and very rich people," said Crabtree.

Bloggers, news groups and email are already transforming the political process in ways that could be adopted by formal institutions. Crabtree cites the way in which news group users help each other rather than clogging up support lines.

Other e-voting issues are more mundane. Early systems at least will be used in parallel with traditional booths, dashing expectations that they will save money. And if people really start to participate as the Government wishes, by making their views known to their representatives, there will be an epidemic of data overload.

"[The Government] will have to multiply by 10 the amount of money they allow MPs for office staff just to answer the emails," concluded Crabtree.

E-VOTING BITS AND PIECES

• E-democracy is about "using technology to energise political life" and is not an alternative to representative democracy, according to the Government.
• Aims include making voting easier and more widespread, making information more easily available and getting people more engaged with their representatives.
• Voting platforms could include public terminals, mobile phones and interactive TV, as well as web-enabled desktop computers.
• Britain is helping to develop an XML dialect called Election Markup Language to record voting data.

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!