New ways: casting votes via the Internet during the Democratic Party’s primary in
Arizona in March 2000.
E-voting
is “an amazing opportunity for our exhausted democratic system.” |
Advocates of e-democracy
profess that the Internet is the only way to bridge the gap between disaffected citizens
and politicians. “Nonsense” say others
 A “dumb rage of impotence” is
how Richard Askwith, a senior editorial writer for the British newspaper The Independent
on Sunday described his feelings in a recent article. “Everything our government
does it does in my name, yet what say have I ever had? One vote in five years, for
a choice of scarcely distinguishable bands of disingenuous careerists. What kind
of choice is that?”
Askwith is implacable: “Parliamentary democracy, invented in the days of the horse
and cart and perfected during the steam age,” has had its day. “It’s time governments
found a new way to let the people decide.”1
The solution? The Internet.
“E-democracy will wake politics up,” says French MP André Santini, mayor of
the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, which he has made into a model Internet-connected
town. “I’m sure it can cure people’s disaffection with politics, just as the Internet
economy is beating unemployment.”2
The
Arizona experiment
The clearest
sign of this political apathy is low voter turnout, to the point that “these days
universal suffrage is now only universal in name,” says Santini. The first Internet
voting experiment was the Democratic Party primary election in the U.S. state of
Arizona that took place from March 7 to 11, 2000. Opponents of e-voting went to court,
arguing that it discriminated against poor people without Internet access (the “digital
divide”).
The court threw out the case. Yet the system’s technical shortcomings, including
the inability to prove a voter’s identity and to ensure the secrecy of the ballot,
were deemed unimportant. Nearly 86,000 Democrats cast ballots, 40,000 of them through
the Internet. Three-quarters of the e-voters were between 18 and 35, an age group
that is usually less interested in voting than their elders. Only slightly over 12,000
people bothered to turn out for the previous such primary four years earlier.
Was the experiment conclusive? A local paper, the Tucson Citizen, said many voters
were drawn more by the method’s novelty than by the candidates. More generally, Stephen
Hess, of the Brookings Institute, thinks that “procedural questions are not what
prevents people from voting.” But Santini believes that e-voting is “an amazing opportunity
for our exhausted democratic system.”
The American firm Election.com has announced it will provide such voting services
for next November’s U.S. presidential election. And Steve Case, of the huge Internet
service provider (ISP) America Online (AOL), thinks experiments like the one in Arizona
are further proof that the Internet is “transforming the way people interact with
their local and national governments.”
Political parties, new citizens’ movements and public authorities are increasingly
quick to grasp that fact, at least in countries wealthy enough to have widespread
Internet access. Until everyone has interactive digital television, the Net seems
to be the quickest, cheapest and only truly interactive way for citizens to exchange
information and opinions between themselves as well as with their elected representatives.
Most political parties now have their own websites to present their platforms. Numerous
public services use them to explain their structure, operations and aims and to answer
people’s questions by e-mail. And many municipalities provide information and consult
citizens by e-mail before taking any major decision.
A
chance to voice views
New citizens
groups that believe in a different kind of globalisation also make intensive use
of the Internet. In South Korea, where nearly half the population is on line, 600
community organizations recently posted a “black list” on the Web of 90 parliamentary
candidates with murky pasts, including some who had been convicted of corruption.
Fifty-eight of them were defeated in the subsequent election, some by virtual unknowns.
Askwith suggests going one step further. He sharply criticised the way a typical
British Royal Commission set up to study a controversial issue operated. In practice,
only the views of the panel’s members and the “experts” who appeared before it carried
any weight, he said. The citizens who attended the hearing were few and unrepresentative.
They were “mostly the retired and unemployed, since the ill-publicised event took
place on a Thursday afternoon.” They did not really understand the issue at hand
and were asked to speak only at the end of the hearing, and even then only briefly
and for appearance’s sake.
In contrast, he says, stand the potential advantages of the Internet, which is already
used by campaigners who, though scattered across the world, are all on-line at the
same time, sometimes several hundred of them for days on end, delving deeply into
an issue and expressing informed and considered opinions. These groups are known
as amphinets. It all costs very little compared with a face-to-face meeting of all
the participants.
Askwith asks, why not use this method and open it up to ordinary citizens chosen
at random? Their views, representing public opinion, would reach the “representatives
of the people,” who would no longer just vaguely hear them but be forced to take
their views seriously.
Other e-democracy advocates go even further. Rather than settling for using electronic
means merely to improve the flawed representativeness of elected officials, why not
do without them altogether? Marc Strassman, executive director of the Campaign for
Digital Democracy,3 suggests an electronic system
good enough to eliminate any possibility of fraud. Voters would use it to voice their
views on every possible and imaginable issue, from whether a country should undertake
a military operation to deciding on the content of a proposed law.
The system would be advanced enough to immediately and electronically analyse the
full range of opinions. Strassman says it would correct the “large and growing imbalance
in political influence between common people and the professional political class
and its clients who increasingly dominate the initiative process.”
The time has gone when parliamentary decisions were taken after “consulting dozens
of people whose opinions and views are highly privileged at the expense of millions
who are disadvantaged by this concentration of power,” Strassman says. We should
switch to “direct electronic democracy” where “millions of e-mail votes determine
the direction of the republic.” In short, he argues, “the Net becomes so powerful,
so ubiquitous and so easy to use” that it can “let us govern ourselves.”
Santini thinks this will be the key to “a shift from an occasional democracy to a
continuous one.” It would be akin to reviving the agora in ancient Athens, the cradle
of democracy where the city’s 20,000 citizens who were entitled to met and debated.
The Net would make such a forum permanent, instantaneous and, when every person on
the planet is on line, worldwide.
Over-reliance
on technology
“Nonsense,”
says Frenchman Jacques Attali, the founder of Planetfinance,4
an electronic microcredit network. First, the agora would not be a democratic ideal:
nobody has thought of reviving it where that would be possible, such as a village
of a few hundred inhabitants. Why? Because the representative system would remain
indispensable.
There is no doubt the system is in crisis, says Patrick Viveret, who writes for the
French magazine Transversales Science Culture. He notes a tendency in representative
systems towards delegating authority that could go as far as confiscating it altogether.
So citizen participation would be absolutely vital to genuine representation, and
the Net would provide “substantial opportunities” in that regard.
But making e-democracy a “global alternative” would mean giving too much power to
the “technicism” which is taking over the modern economy, the idea that “problems
can be solved by technology, independently of the players involved,” warns Viveret.
Democracy requires “collective intelligence”, which is much more than merely the
sum of different opinions, as they are instantly served up by opinion polls today
and will be by the Internet tomorrow (the “democracy of opinions”). There needs to
be “time for careful reflection, nurtured by opinions and counter-opinions bringing
together mediators who say what they think in the public arena,” he says.
Also needed, says Attali, is the “time for political initiatives to prove their worth.”
That might entail a period of unpopularity before they eventually gain widespread
support. The alternative, he says, is an “Internet world” that would lead to “excessively
reversible and contradictory decisions”, and consequently to a “dictatorship of the
here and now.”
1. The Independent,
September 4, 1999.
2. The French daily Libération, April 21, 2000.
3. www.digitaldemocracy.org
4. www.planetfinance.org
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