Hi Felix

I believe that there was a very full discussion of e-voting on oD 3 years ago.

The central weakness of e-voting is the ability to hack the vote. There is good evidence that this is what GWB did in 2004: http://www.greenhealth.org.uk/PolBushFraud.htm

As for re-engagement, if they seriously want better turnout in the UK they would go for PR: the Government knows that turnout is inversely proportional to majority, that is, people do not bother to vote in "safe seats".

Question - how can we reverse the record low turn out at British general elections?

Answer - do anything, or everything to ignore why the majority of the British electorate are so disengaged from the political system - enter e-voting techno-fix.

E-voting is not so much a straight forward fraud, it is more about shying away from answering tough political questions. E-voting, or postal voting, or moving the polling stations, experimenting with compulsory voting, or offering an incentive to vote will not work, because they all fail to tackle the root cause of low voter turnout. The reason why the majority of voters make the historic decision to stay at home, or down the pub on election day, is mainly because they have nothing to vote for.

If the crisis is the record low level of voters, then the answer should, at the very least, be to find ways to re-ignite political life. Low turnout is a major problem because it reveals a snapshot of the level of public disengagement from the political system. E-voting is not a solution to this problem - e-voting cannot re-engage the publics political imagination.

From a New Labour point of view, also, for those who have invested decades praising the virtues of 'participatory democracy', low voter turnout is potentially a political nightmare, only insofar as a low voter turnout is likely to benefit the Conservative Party by default.

The real problem seems to be that the public trust people like the BBC Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman more than they trust an elected member of Parliament, which cannot be a good thing for democracy. Widespread distrust of political elites and their institutions raises uncomfortable questions like: Where's the governments popular mandate? Who exactly does the government represent? What makes this government think it has a mandate to make decisions on behalf of the nation?

Techno-fixes are not a solution to these problems, even if the state made voting complusory and paided taxis to ferry people to and from the polls, this would note change the publics widespread disengagement from the political system - in this current apathetic climate, solutions like that could easily backfire and make the problem worse. Solutions that do not re-engaged the publics political imagination are doomed to failure.

If any of these techno-fixes do end up working, there will be a high price to pay - indeed, other than opening up the electoral process to widespread corruption, who can say that those who would vote over the internet are any more engaged with politics that those who decide to give the polling booths a wide berth? Also, what does it say about our democracy?

Our political masters are so bereft of vision and imagination about how we go about building the 'Good society' that they now have to resort to scaring people into the polling stations by raising the spectra of a BNP election victory - as if...