On online voting and political engagement...
The House of Commons Speaker John Bercow this week announced plans to investigate the possibility of introducing online voting as a means of boosting engagement in politics here in the UK. His assertion that ‘What we are talking about here is nothing less than a Parliament version 2.0.’ is as cringey as reading the attempts of anyone over the age of 18 to use textspeak, but the sentiment is admirable. Turnout at the last three general elections was 59.4%, 61.4% and 65.1% having remained above 71% for all previous elections back to 1922.¹ Hansard’s 10th Audit of Political Engagement found that: ‘Just 41% of the public now say that in the event of an immediate general election they would be certain to vote – a decline of seven percentage points in a year and the lowest level in the debate of the Audit. Twenty percent of people say they are certain not to vote.’ Clearly something needs to be done to get people back to the ballot box.
Would the introduction of online voting work? In Estonia,
the only country to try it on a large scale, it has been introduced to what
appears to be mixed success. The successful part is that people are engaging
with this method of voting – the percentage of online votes in relation to
total votes cast rose from 1.9% on introduction in the 2005 local elections to
a high of 24.3% in the 2011 parliamentary elections. However, while local
election turnout did increase by over 10 percentage points, the effect on
overall turnout seems small in general elections – 61.9% and 63.5% in the last
two.² Personally I feel that it is still worth pursuing though. At the 2010
election here, hundreds of people were unable to vote due to excessive queuing
at polling stations (a very British political problem), and surely the
introduction of online voting could help reduce the chances of that happening again.
Those going along to vote in the late evening and being turned away were likely
doing so after work and/or childcare commitments, but if they had been able to
cast their vote earlier in the day sitting in their office or at home the
problem may never have arisen. While it seems like trivialisation, it could also be argued that with the current culture of TV reality shows in which voting plays a part, millions are in the habit of voting for things from home, so extending this to politics could capture another large market that might not otherwise bother going out to a polling station.
Some might argue that this is quite an age-specific issue; of
course it’s true that younger generations are bigger users of technology. In
the last Estonian general election there was a 60-40 split in i-voters between
those under and over 45, so maybe not as big a gap as might have been expected.
But if youngsters are bigger users of technology then giving them the chance to
vote online in theory will increase the chances that they will actually
participate. Hansard found that in the event of an immediate election ‘just 12%
[of young people] are certain to vote, down from 30% two years ago.’ ³ Offering
easier methods of voting can only help in reclaiming some of these potentially
lost votes, but I think there are wider issues of engagement to be addressed.
The simple fact is that many, many people are massively
turned off by politics at the moment, but at least we have recently seen people
starting to debate why. One of the key political battles of this year was
fought not at the despatch box, but in the pages of the New Statesman, and not
by politicians, but by the comedians Russell Brand and Robert Webb. Both had
valid points. Brand’s call for revolution was flamboyantly OTT – the more
cynical among us might point out that his increasingly vocal right-on messianic
posturing in the media this year has been very well timed to coincide with his
new Messiah Complex tour and accompanying merchandise – but his assertion that
people are completely bored and disenfranchised by the current political order
is quite correct. Indeed Hansard back this up, finding that while slightly less
people are satisfied with how well politicians are doing their jobs, ‘this has
not been accompanied by an increase in dissatisfaction with MPs; more people
than ever are simply ambivalent – they express no opinion one way or the other’.³
I share Webb’s view that Brand was wrong to encourage people not to vote. His
opinion is that not voting ‘...just gives politicians the green light to
neglect the concerns of young people because they’ve been relieved of the
responsibility of courting their vote.’ ⁴
So how to engage this increasingly lost generation? I feel there has to be a fairly seismic shift in the way politicians present themselves and how politics in general is presented to us, the voting public. Webb wrote: ‘[Politicians] are not all the same. “They’re all the same” is what reactionaries love to hear. It leaves the status quo serenely untroubled, it cedes the floor to the easy answers of Ukip and the Daily Mail.’⁴ But for me they need to do much more to demonstrate to us that they’re not all the same. Personally speaking, it’s the rancid culture of blame that turns me off the most. When I hear from a politician, I don’t want to hear exclusively about the terrible evils of their opponents, I want to know what they are going to do for me and my country. My abiding memory of the 2010 election was a Q&A session Nick Clegg undertook with university students a couple of days before the ballot in which the LibDem leader answered every question (or at least started every answer) with a condemnation of what the Tories had done or were proposing, not what his party could promise these young voters. We all know what happened a few days later, and students in particular have since seen the value of his promises.
The internet and in particular social media is going to become one of the key battlegrounds in future elections. In recent times I have become a much more active user of Twitter, and I’ve found it’s quite a hotbed of political activity. With the number of MPs and commentators now active users, the usual slanging matches seem to have been brought out of the chamber and onto our screens. The likes of the erudite but combative Owen Jones do great things in stirring the pot. A good proportion of it of course will make you want to hurl your laptop off the nearest tall building, with endless back and forth accusations draining the will to live from anyone seeking actual answers. After I likened a set of stats blaming the Tories for an increase in assaults on NHS staff to Harold Wilson’s tongue-in-cheek observation that England only win the football World Cup under a Labour government, I had a brief discussion with Dr Éoin Clarke, online scourge of the coalition, asking for an explanation of how the number of assaults were the Tories’ fault. His responses just contained more anti-Tory rhetoric, and didn’t really answer my question. Those of a Labour persuasion seeking to constantly identify the “lies” of and dismantle every proclamation from the blue side would do well to remember the negative publicity they suffered as a result of not being able to fully deliver all the promises on their notorious election pledge cards. I absolutely will vote in the next election, and while currently undecided there’s a reasonable chance that I might vote Labour, but petty mudslinging of this nature will only serve to put me off.
All in all, I would say yes, we need technological innovations like online voting to mobilise and re-energise British voters to take interest in and engage with British politics, but an image and attitude change to the system (more than a total change of the system itself) is of paramount importance. The country is not in a good way at the moment, and it’s reached the point where we don’t care whose fault it is, we just want to know how it’s going to be fixed and who is going to fix it. We don’t need more finger pointing, and we don’t need Russell Brand’s revolution, just a genuine and concerted campaign of positive politics.
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