Does democracy need an ‘e’?

Next month’s local government elections promise to be the usual snooze. But John Prescott has found £10m for each of the next three years to help councils pay for the hardware, software and processing for e-voting and the e-counting of ballot papers.

Prescott’s measly-looking budget works out, in fact, as a tenth of the £300m he has given local councils to implement full e-government by 31 December 2005.

It’s a pity. According to Accenture’s eGovernment Leadership: Engaging the Customer, the fourth in a series of annual global studies of e-government, Britain is losing ground to other countries in delivering government services online. It’s not just that we are in the second division in the e-government World Cup – behind Canada, which for three years has been the only player in the first division. We have also slipped from sixth to eighth place in our second tier.

Canada displays updated weather maps. Astonishingly, when pensioners and farmers want state dosh, a single electronic request will crawl across many different government programmes looking for it. The Canadian government segments users, joins up state agencies over multiple channels, and measures the results. And the results are that half the population uses e-government – compared with a tenth in Britain.

Yet this gap does not appear to bother local government minister Nick Raynsford much. For him, digital TV, kiosks and text-messaging over 17 pilot schemes are “positioning the UK as one of the leaders in e-voting in Europe”.

Raynsford says voting electronically will be easier and more convenient – especially for some people with disabilities. Sir Jeremy Beecham, chair of the Local Government Association, agrees. He says election systems haven’t changed for the past century, and that testing a new sort is essential “to ensure the fundamentals of our democratic system – secrecy and security – are maintained”.

It is all a plausible prelude to e-assisted general elections in 2006. But when we hear, as we have recently, of events like Lord Sainsbury giving the Labour Party £2.5m to survive, we are bound to ask: will e-voting dispel the clouds beginning to gather over democracy in Britain, or is it just one more of those clouds?

Democracy is as little about disability, security and safety as it is about being more multi-channel than the rest of the EU. It’s supposed to be about a clash of political ideas. The content used to be exciting enough to get people walking out in the rain to vote – to test the ideas with majorities in Parliament.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with a multi-channel strategy for voting.

After all, the Tories used to lay on a taxi for you if you were old. But now New Labour promises something much dodgier: SMS voting if you are a youthful couch potato. A great way to discourage electoral apathy and promote the merits of IT, guys!