Poll position

Does e-voting mean the end of the ballot box? Michael Cross investigates

With Concorde retiring and the Dome possibly being turned into a giant casino, the UK needs a national symbol of innovation. In e-voting, it has one. According to e-democracy expert Stephen Coleman, no other country has gone as far as the UK in applying the internet to voting. (Coleman's own post, professor of e-democracy at Oxford University, is itself a world first.)

Earlier this year, this commitment culminated in the biggest trial yet of e-voting to be sponsored by a nation state in a government election: the local e-voting pilots in the English council elections. The pilots covered 14% of the English electorate. Mostly, the technology and processes worked well. There was only one snag: when it came to the main purpose of the exercise - increasing turnout - e-voting had little measurable impact.

An official evaluation by the Electoral Commission (The Shape of Elections to Come: a Strategic Evaluation of the 2003 Electoral Pilot Schemes) found "some evidence that turnout can increase slightly" from the availability of e-voting. The increase was impossible to measure, but an "indicative figure" is somewhere between 0% and 5%. Postal voting, by contrast, consistently improved turnouts by 50%.

However, the commission urged that further pilots go ahead, and called for a fundamental building block of e-voting, a locally created but nationally accessible electronic electoral register.

The good news from last May is that 115,283 people cast votes using e-channels across 14 authorities. That was on average just over 11% of the electorate. The figure for people choosing e-voting looked even better when measured against actual turnout.

In Sheffield, which carried out the most ambitious e-voting trial, 20,845 votes were cast electronically - a record 37% of the total turnout.

The Sheffield pilot was also an impressive exercise in multi-channel e-government: voters could send a text message from their mobile phone, call a touch-tone phone service, vote via a website on their computers or use public electronic kiosks dotted around the city.

Voters in some wards were authenticated by multi-purpose smart cards issued by the city council to 200,000 residents.

However, despite these efforts, Sheffield's overall turnout was 29.53%, unchanged from the previous election, when it pioneered e-voting in three of 29 wards. This suggests that most people who used the new channels would have voted anyway.

Councils holding all-postal ballots did better at boosting numbers: south Somerset's turnout was nearly 9% up on the previous election.

Overall, according to the office of the deputy prime minister, the average turnout for all postal ballots was just under 50%, well above the average of one-third.

Mainly, the e-voting technology worked well in May. The only notable glitch in electronic voting was at St Albans, where problems with verifying e-votes meant that at 15 polling stations paper ballots were used instead.

However, the Electoral Commission warned that IT suppliers will need to smarten up their act, particularly when it comes to transparency and processes for collating votes from different sources.

"In general terms, however, processes at the e-voting counts were not well developed in advance and were rarely documented.

"The processes often involved the manual transfer of results data (for example, by email), followed by an import into standard office technology (for example, Microsoft Word or Excel) and manual transformations. Difficulties were apparent in the integration of the count from different voting channels."

The commission said the government should, as a priority, "develop a detailed road map towards its stated goal, drawing on expertise across the public and private sectors in the successful development of major IT projects. It is important that this road map is in place before the next round of electronic pilots to enable progress to be reported against an agreed long-term project plan."

However, the new Department for Constitutional Affairs is already drawing up plans for the next big test of e-voting. Under legislation unveiled last month, English councils organised by region will be able to allow e-voting in European and local elections on June 10 next year.

Christopher Leslie, minister at the Department for Constitutional Affairs, said the legislation would "allow important pilots of innovative voting methods to continue at local government elections and to take place at European parliamentary elections for the first time."

But first, central government may need to put some national building blocks in place. In a separate report published in June (Voting for Change: an Electoral Law Modernisation Programme), the commission calls for reform in electoral registration.

The aim is to move from household - a throwback to the time when only property owners could vote - to registration by individuals. To register, each voter will have to identify themselves (presumably by the ID card being mooted by the Home Office) rather than as today: being named by the householder (or whoever fills in the electoral registration form). Apart from reducing the risk of fraud, the commission says a national register is an essential step towards e-voting.

"We also need to have a national electronic register, compiled locally, to make e-enabled elections a realistic aspiration and to allow votes to be cast securely from any polling station."

The commission also proposes allowing citizens to register much more closely to the date of an election, including over the internet and by telephone. It does not say how voters will prove their identity electronically.

The report is a boost for the delayed Local Authority Secure Electoral Register (Laser) project, a national register planned by the ODPM with the commission, the Local Government Association and the Improvement and Development Agency. The Treasury has already allocated £12m for Laser, but the project is awaiting the go-ahead.

Nationally, the government says it is committed to holding a total e-enabled general election sometime after 2006. However, new channels will run in parallel with the old: ballot papers and boxes will be around for a long time to come.

This has implications for cost: the Electoral Commission points out that the UK spends less per head on elections than many comparable countries (eg a quarter of the Canadian figure). Local authorities are particularly economical (or stingy).

Updating 408 local electoral registers costs £72m each year. Although the signs are that the UK will be the first major country to hold an e-enabled general election, others are investing in the basic technology. In this year's Belgian general election, 44% of Belgians (3.2m citizens) voted electronically at polling stations. First results were announced 15 minutes after polling stations closed.

Surprisingly, the US, where internet voting technology was born, is unlikely to take the lead. Internet polls in primary elections have been challenged under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a key piece of civil rights legislation which banned discriminatory electoral practices. As fewer American blacks than whites have internet access, an internet presidential election is unlikely - however flawed existing processes are.