Opinion

tribune. NEIL STOKES

Voting in the 21st century

I have a con­fes­sion to make. No, it's not what you think. In fact, it's worse: I did not vote in the No­vem­ber 9 par­tic­i­pa­tive process. In my de­fence, it would be bet­ter to ex­press it as I still haven't voted, be­cause at the time of writ­ing I still have five days left until bal­lots close on No­vem­ber 25. I know that sounds like clas­sic pro­cras­ti­na­tion, but I have to make a spe­cial ef­fort to go to Barcelona to vote and so far I haven't had the chance.

At the risk of delv­ing into a pit of ex­cuses, the rea­son I didn't vote is be­cause I was phys­i­cally un­able to get to the polling sta­tion for rea­sons far too bor­ing to go into here. There may have been other ways to get my vote counted, such as postal vot­ing or proxy vot­ing, but there was so lit­tle in­for­ma­tion about ful­fill­ing one's de­mo­c­ra­tic duty that I knew of no other way than putting in a per­sonal ap­pear­ance.

Now, this sit­u­a­tion brings up two sub­jects that need ex­plor­ing: pro­vid­ing in­for­ma­tion and phys­i­cally at­ten­dance, and these top­ics apply to all vot­ing, not just the par­tic­i­pa­tive process.

I don't know about you, but my phone never stops ping­ing. The damn thing even has its own ways of sneak­ing on­line, open­ing a tor­rent of un­so­licited in­for­ma­tion. Whether email, mes­sages or no­ti­fi­ca­tions it seems cer­tain peo­ple and or­gan­i­sa­tions every­where have lit­tle trou­ble in find­ing me, at any time of the day and night. The in­ter­net is not called the in­for­ma­tion su­per­high­way for noth­ing, which makes me won­der why no one closer to home did not give me a heads-up on how to go about vot­ing on No­vem­ber 9, and what to do if I missed my chance. I had to find out in a news­pa­per, al­beit on-line.

The other thing that seems strange is that I can't just vote from my phone. Going by the prin­ci­ple that if you want peo­ple to vote, make it as easy as pos­si­ble for them, isn't it about time we had in­ter­net vot­ing? What's more, the issue of polling peo­ple di­rectly on­line has reper­cus­sions for democ­racy, such as an in­crease in di­rect, rather than rep­re­sen­ta­tive, democ­racy. This could mean less need for politi­cians, for ex­am­ple, and there­fore – ex­cuse my cyn­i­cism – less cor­rup­tion, while en­cour­ag­ing vot­ers to take more re­spon­si­bil­ity as cit­i­zens in a democ­racy. Clearly there are tech­ni­cal is­sues sur­round­ing these points, but ex­ist­ing ser­vices, such as on-line shop­ping, show that they are far from being in­solv­able.

Ob­vi­ously, this ar­ti­cle merely raises the sub­ject, and to speak with any real au­thor­ity I would have to do a lot more re­search into the sub­ject of on-line vot­ing. The prob­lem is that I don't have the time, I have a train to catch so that I can spend the day in Barcelona cast­ing my vote.

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