Brits let their fingers do the voting

Over 40,000 e-votes have already been cast in 10 of the 17 areas piloting e-voting for today's local elections, council officials have told vnunet.com.

When the polls close tonight, at least one in 20 people eligible to vote electronically will have done so via the phone or internet.

Councils have been using a variety of devices, including secure websites, SMS, touch-tone telephones, street kiosks and digital television, in this latest experiment in democracy, which the government hopes will increase voter turnout.

In Vale Royal, Cheshire 8,098 out of an electorate of 95,000 had cast votes electronically when the 10-day window for e-votes closed on Monday, representing 8.5 per cent of the constituency.

In Swindon Borough Council, 7.5 per cent of the electorate voted electronically, with the biggest chunk, 6,895, voting over the internet.

"It was a lot of hard work, but we're absolutely delighted with the results, and so were the voters," said Anne Bingham-Holmes, chief executive of Vale Royal Borough Council.

The council claimed that 99 per cent of voters said they would use the system again, and 77 per cent had described it as very easy to use.

But experts warned that numbers alone do not necessarily make the pilot worthwhile.

"The success of the pilot depends on a number of other factors, like who is voting online, are these people who would not normally be voting, and is there an overall increase in turnout. Then that would be a good result," said Stephen Coleman, visiting professor of e-democracy at Oxford University.

Richard Allan MP, Liberal Democrat IT spokesman and joint chairman of the all-party Internet Committee, insisted that a wider context is needed.

"E-voting needs to be thought of in a wider context of participation and how people use technology in relation to politics. I think it's a mistake to make the link to turnout as the primary motivation," he said.