Labour will 'never see Number 10 again without online voting'
I have been thinking about the wreckage of the election results for Labour, why the exit polls were so different to the opinion polls and why only 66 per cent of those eligible to vote actually voted.
Chris Averill
This election was expected to attract the largest youth turnout since 1964 if all 70 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds who had registered to vote had actually cast their vote with Labour leading in the polls among the 18 to 24 demographic. So what happened?
Well, firstly, opinion polls look at what people think they will do rather than exit polls which look at how people actually voted, and so as we all know now with the benefit of hindsight are a far more accurate reflection. But the bigger issue I think is that we have a generation of young voters who feel no connection to their politicians, don’t understand their policies and have no interest in the political process and therefore abstain from voting altogether.
As I write this, I am sitting next to one of those young voters who abstained from getting involved with this general election. He simply couldn’t face wading through all the complicated and technical jargon that goes into the party manifestos and therefore on the face of it, couldn’t differentiate one party’s views from another and how these resonated with his own. Yet equally, he didn’t want to make a snap decision based on tribal family ties or his more outspoken friends on social media, so he chose not to vote.
I admit, a political campaign goes far beyond just the vote itself, but if you can't get your constituents into voting booths on polling day then everything that has gone before was a waste of time and funding; and frankly even those booths are an outdated and outmoded concept in today’s digital world. It’s the equivalent of asking folks to go into a shop and pay for their goods with a cheque!
There has been a lot of discussion around the pros and cons of digital voting, with concepts such as digital voting booths, online portals and computerised counting systems all being brought up and rejected by traditionalists. But something has to change as, quite frankly, we have moved no further forward from 2010 when only 65 per cent of those eligible to vote voted, despite all the pre-election hype and live TV debates.
In my opinion we need to go one step further. I categorically do not think Labour stand a chance of winning an election, not just in 2020 but ever until we can vote online or via a mobile app.
It’s a bold claim, but historically the younger generation lean toward the left and this year’s social media reports back that up. In the same way corporations understand they need to interact with millennials differently, the political parties need to bring everything into the digital age. By the 2020 elections, everyone under the age of 30 will have grown up with the internet and social media, so if Labour can’t work to interact with the disenfranchised millennial voters that support their voting base they will face a repeat of this year’s disaster.
Alongside the voting process, the entire world has changed the political landscape of the UK. Smartphones and wearable tech mean that everyone is communicating in snippets, sound-bites of information in a tweet or text message; we no longer have the attention span to engage with a 100-page manifesto.
I propose a radical solution to this problem. By hosting all manifestos digitally on a secure central database, in clear succinct bullet points that the public can easily understand, we can enable the public to directly interact with the manifestos – voting on what they like or dislike, comparing their own views to those of their local candidates and providing real-time feedback for the political parties. The digital space will allow politicians to localise the election process, gain direct interactivity that is lacking from the current system.
I freely admit, the security is not yet there – we can’t trust that an application or mobile site will be completely safe from hacking – but is it really any worse than what we have now? As long as I know my neighbour’s name and postcode I can easily vote in his place. And what preventions are there to secure postal voters from being coerced?
There are significant hurdles to overcome before we can bring in a full digital voting system but we need to start now and accept the change before we further disenfranchise the voters.
I will leave you with Jacqui Smith’s opinion that it is time to look to the next generation for the new Labour leader. She says: "We do need to find a leader who can, yes, develop the policies, but actually can connect with people; who, people in my former constituency think, 'yes, they get me'; they are going to make my life better in the future."
Chris Averill is CEO of we are experience