E-voting would attract more voters on Election Day

A recent survey of 931 people it was found that an additional 395,640 people would have voted on Election Day had e-voting been available to them. 

The method of e-voting surveyed was not the electronic voting machines much publicised in recent years, but the option to vote using a secure website, telephone voting, or by using mobile phones.  

Of those surveyed, 44 per cent who didn't voted claimed it was due to difficulties in getting to the polling station that prevented them from voting.

Over half of those surveyed said they would be willing to vote using e-voting if it were made available. According to Damovo Ireland, the communications company who undertook the survey with Millward Brown, “This corresponds to 395,640 additional voters”.  The survey also found that 72 per cent of those who didn't vote “but would have been willing to use electronic methods” were in the 18-34 age group.

Respondents gave the following as reasons for not being able to get to their assigned polling stations: holidays, business trips, illness, away at college and registered in a different constituency.

John McCabe, managing director of Damovo Ireland said that the survey  “reveals that Irish people are very open to the proposition of voting by electronic means”.

“As expected, younger people showed most interest in voting remotely via the web, phone or by text.  Alarmingly, our poll revealed that half of 18-24 year olds didn't vote in the recent election. For many of this generation, the concept of going to a polling station to write an ‘X' on a card seems strange to them. With another quarter of a million Irish teenagers reaching voting age at the next election, the government should start to consider additional voting methods.”

The researchers also looked into how election candidates used technology to campaign in the recent election. They found that 88 per cent of those surveyed “did not receive direct information from election candidates/political parties via electronic sources during the recent election (excluding TV and radio)”. However a small number of respondents did receive information electronically. “Five percent did so via a mobile phone text, four per cent from an internet site, three per cent via email, two per cent from an internet blog site, two per cent from a podcast and one per cent from an internet video.”

Of those surveyed who would have been willing to use e-voting, voting using a mobile phone proved to be the most popular among the 18 to 24 year olds. However 25-34 year olds preferred the website option. Voting over the phone proved popular with the over 50s while there was an “even spilt” across all three options in the 34 to 49 year olds.

Referrning to the low use of low incidence of electronic campaigning given Ireland's technically savvy population McCabe said, “To harness the power of digital communications, political parties should be proactively looking at new methods, such as blogging and podcasts, to get their message across.”

According to the survey: “The vast majority of respondents (88 per cent) did not receive direct information from election candidates/political parties via electronic sources during the recent election (excluding TV and radio). For those that did receive information, five per cent did so via a mobile phone text, four per cent from an Internet site, three per cent via email, two per cent from an Internet blog site, two per cent from a podcast and one per cent from an Internet video.”

Damovo do agree however if this new form of e-voting was to be introduced to Ireland, the highest possible security measures would have to be undertaken. It should also, according to Damovo, be implemented on a phased basis.

“We realise that any of the proposed methods would have to be rigorously tested. Recent security advancements such as biometric voice verification could prove very useful. This uses spoken words to verify identities over the phone or web.  Every citizen could potentially have a unique digital representation of their own voice. We would recommend that any attempt to introduce e-voting should be phased-in gradually, possibly using local elections as a first step,” McCabe said.

On the possibility of Ireland making more use of technology McCabe said, “In Ireland, we have an increasingly tech-savvy population. The way we communicate with each other has evolved hugely over the past decade and will continue to do so. Going forward, we should be harnessing these technological advancements to ensure that all of our citizens can be included in the democratic process”.