Casting ballots via the internet could reshape the concept of 'direct democracy'
By Jerome Simpson
In ancient Athens, citizens flocked to the amphitheatre to vote on decisions of public interest. When the amphitheatre became too small to accommodate the growing population, Athenians began electing representatives. Now, with the dawn of the information and communications technology (ICT) age, the internet provides us with a possibly new decision-making environment-a sort of virtual amphitheatre.
Besides being a huge source of information and entertainment, the internet is used to interact online and extend social lives beyond working hours. All sorts of virtual communities abound on social networking sites, blogs and message boards, launching new friendships and alliances.
With respect to political processes, online forums are often deployed to galvanise protestors for participation in campaigns and mass demonstrations. In 2006, for instance, users of MySpace (which attracts some 320,000 profile registrations per day) helped spread the word about immigration rights demonstrations across the US, enabling grassroots information sharing between large numbers of people. Opinions and decisions are also being shared electronically in the environment sector. Parallel with the United Nations Climate Change conference in Bali in December 2007, science journal Nature, having purchased an archipelago of islands called 'Second Nature' within the virtual world Second Life, hosted its own forum among climate experts, or their representational avatars.
The government sector is slowly getting in on the act, too. A mid-2007 initiative by the British government led to nearly 2 million people signing an online petition calling for planned pay-as-you-drive road charges to be scrapped. At the European level, an Interreg IIIB project piloted a virtual 3D visualisation and planning tool to provide support in public consultation processes. Relying on Google Earth maps, the tool allows online testing of environmental models against various decision scenarios. Malta's environmental protection agency, since going digital, has noted a "radical increase" in organisations viewing planning applications online, according to information system guru Antoine Zahra, attributing the spike to people no longer having to leave their workplace to stand in queues at the planning office.
With this kind of progress, what are the chances for actually engaging virtual communities in voting procedures? Australia's Senator On-Line is already leading the way. Touted as the first online party, Senator On-Line's ten unaffiliated representatives cast their votes based solely on internet responses from registered voters.
Politically speaking, one big demographic challenge to address is 'e-inclusion.' With the EU busy rolling out an abundance of e-type strategies, a recent UNECE report on knowledge-based economies reveals that many social groups in several countries lag far behind mainstream society in ICT usage. These include recent immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, disabled individuals, the long-term unemployed and rural populations.
Meanwhile, in the US, presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are taking a proactive online approach, both having registered on MySpace and gaining 66,000 and 23,000 'friends' respectively. Will voters respond to the environmental merits of such an approach, or will alarm bells ring 'spam?'
One country where online elections have already taken place is Estonia, and we may soon see virtual voting on day-to-day legislation, policies and programmes, which of course will require a different set of technical solutions to assure that one person equals one vote. In fact, we may eventually find ourselves eventually asking whether we even need political representation. Now, there's a thought.
