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Ringing endorsement it was not. The Electoral Commission has concluded that May's big test of e-voting in local elections produced "some evidence that turnout can increase slightly". 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%.

Should we now discard e-democracy as a piece of dotcom hype? Of course not. First, e-democracy, with its potential for involving citizens in local decision-making, is a lot bigger than e-voting and merits investigation. Second, e-voting's failure to increase turnouts instantly doesn't mean it won't play a long-term role.

The commission's report says that despite the lack of measurable effect, e-voting technology generally worked well in May. One triumph was the "remarkably successful" first use of election mark-up language (EML). While two authorities, St Albans and Sheffield, experienced "significant operational problems", these were sorted out on the day.

Some areas still need work, the commission says. One challenge is ensuring that polling stations are properly wired up; another is to develop consistent and transparent ways of merging counts from electronic and paper ballots. The report also questions one aspect of IT industry culture: its habit of delivering kit for acceptance testing only an hour before the polls opened. Finally, future pilots should explore scalability and cost.

First, however, the government (presumably the new department for constitutional affairs) should produce a detailed "road map" as to where we're supposed to be going.

One suggestion: towards 100% turnout. We could start by adopting all-postal ballots in local elections, subject to safeguards suggested by the commission. These include a change to registration by individuals rather than households, together with explicit warnings about personation. Local authorities would also have to provide staffed "delivery points" for people with questions, or wanting to hand in ballots. These measures apply to all forms of remote voting and could be adapted to e-voting when the time comes.

But if we are serious about boosting turnout, there's a painful, but necessary, first step. Make voting compulsory, as in Belgium and Australia. Anyone who really wants to abstain would make their point much better if the act carried a hefty fine.

The other side to compulsion must be convenience. We should be able to cast our vote from any polling station (connected to the proposed shared electronic electoral register), by post and - eventually - by internet.

This is not to say compulsion would be popular. It's a good bet that any government passing such a law would lose the subsequent general election (if abstainers are intellectually consistent, that bet becomes a certainty). So the idea would appeal only to a retiring prime minister with little enthusiasm for the chosen successor. And what's the likelihood of that?

· The Shape of Elections to Come:

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