E-GOVERNMENT
EU e-voting site 'is a turn-off': report
05-03-2003
by
Forrester Research claims that the EU's e-Vote Web site may actually have a negative effect upon public perceptions of the Internet as a democratic agent.
The e-Vote site, evote.eu2003.gr, was established by the Greek Presidency of the EU and is supported by the European Commission. The site offers visitors the opportunity to vote on issues relating to the current and future role of the EU and also invites people to vote on issues such as the current crisis in Iraq. The site claims that it is encouraging people to use the Internet and to get involved in discussions and decision-making in the EU.
"I can only speculate that the organisers set up the site to increase participation in democracy," said Jaap Favier, director of research at Forrester, speaking to ElectricNews.net. "But democracy doesn't lend itself to this experiment and we believe that it may be counter-productive and will turn people off."
Although the site is meant to promote voting among European citizens, it has no way of checking the identity of the voter, or whether voters have provided their actual country of citizenship when voting. It also has no way of preventing people from voting more than once on the same issue.
Forrester notes that the site asks visitors to become sponsors of the site by creating links from their own sites to that of e-Vote, but does not place restrictions on the wording of these links. Links could be made from commercial sites, implying a link between these companies and e-voting in the EU.
"The site could be setting themselves up for a nasty association, because the EU doesn't want democracy to be associated with big capital," said Favier.
Favier said the site has problems beyond the sponsorship aspect, since it purports to support democracy through a medium to which only 54 percent of Europeans have access.
"The fundamental and principal problem with e-voting is that national and EU governments must give everybody the same rights when it comes to gathering information and voting," said Favier. "Since 46 percent of people don't have Internet access at home, e-voting automatically discriminates against 46 percent of the population."
Studies show that the people who have Internet access at home tend to be wealthier than people who don't, which could give an unfair advantage to parties whose policies favour wealthier voters.
"Even an election that offered both e-voting as well as normal voting in a public building would give the wrong results," said Favier. "People who had Internet access at home would have easier access to voting than people who didn't."
Other issues such as voter authentication and security also pose significant problems to the implementation of e-voting in the EU. On the other hand, Favier says that government initiatives to post proposed and new legislation on the Internet and the availability of many politicians via e-mail have been positive democratic developments. However he cautioned that some of these developments are little more than window-dressing and that many politicians don't actually read their e-mail.
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