Three cheers for e-democracy

The first professor of e-democracy at Oxford University has praised the government's progress on using the internet to improve the democratic process.

In an exclusive interview with vnunet.com, Professor Stephen Coleman said that the UK had taken the lead with a commitment to an e-enabled election by 2006, using the web or other digital means.

But he played down concerns surrounding e-voting, which he said hinged on negative perceptions, and suggested that the whole subject had been hyped out of all proportion.

"The age of the paper ballot is over," he declared. "The question is whether the system is robust enough to give you the same security that you get offline.

"What you have to address is the assumptions. It's not a technology issue; the issues are no different for postal voting. I don't think the concerns are in proportion, but they must be taken notice of."

Hacking is not the problem for e-voting, said Coleman. The danger is that an individual may be forced to vote a certain way, or that someone else will vote on their behalf.

An Electoral Commission report on trials at 30 local council polls, held in May, concluded that the new technology had no significant impact on voter numbers.

It also indicated that e-voting in a UK general election is unlikely to happen before 2010.

"E-voting is a convenience," said Professor Coleman. "In 20 years' time people will ask: 'Did you really have to go to a polling station?' But it will not make for a more democratic society."

The main challenges that must be overcome, said Coleman, are paradoxical legal requirements, such as combining the need to preserve voter anonymity with the requirement for an audit trail of the ballot.

"I'm not a technologist but I would say - at the most pessimistic - that I would like to run an e-voting experiment and offer a prize to every hacker to [successfully] attack the systems," said the professor.

"I think there's an element of put up or shut up about this."

Richard Allan, Liberal Democrat spokesman on IT, said that security is an important issue, but less of a hurdle than some political considerations.

"An electronic voting system can potentially be made at least as secure as the current paper voting system, which actually does very little by way of voter identity verification," he explained.

But Allan warned that more research is needed to assess potential problems if there is a large-scale move to remote, rather than supervised, voting.

"Under the current system, the paper ballots can be retrieved for manual checking by all the parties concerned," he said.

"There is a need to build audit trails and checking procedures into any electronic system that would command a similar degree of confidence."