Why Can’t We Vote Online?

As I dragged myself out of bed ten minutes (yes, a whole ten minutes) early this morning in order to nip down the road to my local polling station and cast my vote in the general election, I found myself wondering why we can’t do this whole voting thing online (and in bed).

Wouldn’t that just be easier?

I imagine a system where you could log in, put your vote in say, a week before the deadline, and find out who is winning so far. You could change your mind up until the deadline, finally marking your vote as definite and unchangeable once you’re happy on the last day. In my imaginary system, you would also be able to easily access party manifestos and the profiles of your local candidates from one portal. Even if being able to see real-time statistics online is just pie-in-the-sky thinking, why can’t we just hop online to cast our votes without even getting out of bed?

Apparently, I’m not the first person to ask this.

Trials have taken place in the UK before (as well as in the US), in Liverpool and Sheffield, among other places. These trials were in 2002, 2003 and 2007, with an online turnout of up to 26%. The Electoral Commission said the technology had worked well.

But that was with a turnout of around a quarter of residents in just a small part of the country. What happens when for example, 80% of the whole UK population tries to access this website on the same day? That’s over 51 million people. Or would there have to be one website per constituency? That’s 650 websites, and it’s starting to sound like an expensive mission. Think of the servers!

In 2010 65.1% of the population voted, compared to 71% in 1997 before the numbers suddenly plummeted. So understandably, the media and government are urging people to vote harder than ever before. In 2010 just 44% of people aged 18-24 voted, but perhaps if there were a more convenient and modern way for people to vote, it would encourage this demographic to put a digital cross on their digital ballot paper.

You could argue that walking down to the polling station isn’t particularly inconvenient, and the current system is even less hassle if you vote by proxy or apply for a postal vote. But with everything else going the way of the internet (shopping, banking, doing your taxes, applying for a driving licence…), is our voting system being left in the dark ages?

Even if we were to all agree that’s true, we are still a long way off from being able to vote online. This system would have to be pretty robust to cope with the amount of traffic it would receive, and the government doesn’t have a brilliant track record for implementing new IT systems. And we haven’t even touched on the security issues.

Would a system like this ever be tough enough to resist hacking, keep everyone’s votes private and ensure a fair count? Could someone log in and vote pretending to be me? What if I submit my vote but the page doesn’t respond so I try clicking some more and my vote is accidentally entered twenty times?

As online marketers and web developers, we’re obviously keen on all things the internet. But I think my ideal voting system will just have to wait a few more years until the technology catches up. In the meantime, you’re never very far away from a polling station.