Is It Sensible to Allow People to Vote Online?

                                         

 Many people argue against a move towards online voting concerning political polls. This is because people are afraid of problems such as fraud. However, other people argue that online voting is the way of the future, and that if we were allowed to vote online, we would have much better turnouts – as opposed to the low numbers that we see now. Well, there are good and bad points to voting online. Below, we are going to look at the advantages of doing so.

Advantages

·          Convenience: Many people fail to vote because it takes too much time. You have to go to your local polling station and queue, or you have to go to the hassle of filling in a postal vote and then finding a post box. Yeah, it’s not hard, but it’s something people would rather not do. With an online vote, they won’t have to. They’ll simply go online and cast their vote – it’s very easy. 

·          Security: People often say that online voting will be insecure, but we already use the internet to run opinion voting poll with little problems. Furthermore, most of us are happy to do our banking online, register for tax, and complete various other forms. Very few of us have any problems with fraud, and when we do, it is usually our own fault for not being careful. We have already heard of accusations of vote fixing. We rely on people to be honest and count votes correctly, but there are so many people involved that it is inevitable that mistakes are made, or that people skew results on purpose.Sure, we may have computer problems, but they will be traceable, unlike the mistakes of people (purposeful or otherwise). 

·         Participation: We have a very low turnout of voter in the UK. This is especially true of the younger    generations who simply don’t care about voting anymore. If we were to make it more accessible to them,   then perhaps they would be more likely to vote. This would allow many more people to take part in the   running of the country. At present, the people who turn out are mis representative of the population at large, because only the most politically motivated vote. 

·           Cost: It costs money to run traditional voting booths. You have to pay people to operate the voting stations and to make sure that people are voting correctly and that they are not cheating or looking at other’s votes. It costs money to hire the venues and to pay people to actually count the votes. An online system will be much simpler to run, and will enable us to save money; which given the massive deficit that the government owns, would not be a bad thing. 

·          Real time tallies: OK, so part of the fun of the general elections is in waiting for the scores to come in. we have special program mes where we go through all of the different towns, waiting for people to add up the votes. With online voting, we can do it in real time. We can see who’s winning and when, and we can watch as they get overtaken. It’s all quite fun.

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