We were promised internet voting...

As millions of Britons trudge to their local polling stations to cast their vote, it seems a good moment to ask: What happened to the government's promise of "an e-enabled election some time after 2006"?

As my new freedom of information request shows, any moves to introduce internet voting have now ground to a halt amid deadlock between the government and the Electoral Commission, the elections watchdog which ministers themselves created, over how to proceed.

Despite some pressure from within government, particularly from the Ministry of Defence which sees internet voting as a way to enfranchise troops on operations abroad, the Ministry of Justice now has no plans to move forward.

When policies go bad

From at least February 2002 the government was committed to "an ever more extensive program of pilots at future local elections to open up the possibility of an e-enabled general election some time after 2006".

These internet voting pilots began in May 2002 and were extended in 2003.

But with hindsight, the optimistic intentions were already beginning to fall apart as early as July 2003, when the Electoral Commission called on the government to develop a roadmap for future modernisation of the electoral system.

When the government responded in September of that year, it said the Commission's call for a long-term plan "betrays an assumption that the timing and nature of this goal is certain, and that the remaining questions relate mainly to implementation". It said small-scale pilots should continue.

This marked the beginning of a divergence between the Commission and ministers which appears to have resulted in policy paralysis. Further pilots followed in 2007, but reviews of them by the Commission and government saw them both hardening their different stances.

The government was left unable move in the face of opposition from its own watchdog, but the Commission favoured the development of a strategy which the government was unwilling to deliver.

Weakening commitment

In January 2006 the government was insisting it remained "committed to the goal of multi-channel elections sometime after 2006", but the passage of time had made that policy obviously untenable.

By July 2007 the commitment was downgraded to a statement in the Governance of Britain green paper that: "In the longer term, the government is investigating the potential benefits of remote electronic voting (using the internet and telephone systems), taking advantage of developing communications technologies to provide increased flexibility and choice in the way people vote."

So a commitment to action within a definite timescale had suddenly become an undefined long-term investigation.

One reading might be that the government was keeping open the option to conduct more pilot schemes – despite the Electoral Commission's objections – in the name of "investigation". More likely, the political cost of the policy had been raised by cases of fraud in separate postal voting experiments, ministers realised the position had become deadlocked, were unwilling to compromise and so abandoned their policy.

In June 2008, internet voting was raised in a public consultation, but was tacked on as a side issue to a bigger question about whether the UK should switch to weekend voting.

In October 2008 the government said that responses to the consultation would "inform the way forward".

Since 2006, each announcement on internet voting was resulting in a weaker commitment to action.

Then in March 2010, in one of its final acts before the election, the government published its response to the 'weekend voting' consultation, and touched on the issue of internet voting.

Having previously said this consultation would help it move forward, the government found "continued popular support" for internet voting, with around two thirds of the responses being in favour.

But despite this, ministers now simply said that it is "an area that needs to be kept under review" - Whitehall-speak for saying that no further action will be taken.

And this included any further pilots. In November 2007 the government had said that "we do not agree with the Commission that no further e-voting pilots should be undertaken" without a broader strategy. Now its position was that security concerns would be addressed "if [emphasis added] there is to be further examination of the viability of e-voting".

Freedom of information

That this is the case is confirmed by a freedom of information request I made in March.

The Ministry of Justice's response in April confirmed "there is no current or planned expenditure on remote electronic voting at this time".

Another revelation which indicates a lack of interest in internet voting relates to communications on the issue between the Commission and the government.

In August 2007 the watchdog called for a blueprint on best practices in internet voting, and in November that year the government replied that it would "work with the Commission and other stakeholders on public consultation".

But in its freedom of information response, the Ministry of Justice said:

"In response to your request on consultations with the public or other government departments, or agencies, or the Electoral Commission, there has been none in relation to e-voting other than as part of the government's consultation on Election Day: Weekend Voting which emanated from the government’s July 2007 Governance of Britain publication."

The Ministry of Justice and the Electoral Commission are clearly talking at rather than to each other, exchanging statements reaffirming their positions - a sign of a dysfunctional relationship.

The FoI response also confirmed "there are no plans currently to pilot remote electronic voting".

"There has not been further development on a strategy to be published for remote electronic voting and there are no proposals to develop a specific strategy at this time," said the MoJ.

So despite the positive responses to the 2008 consultation which was to "inform the way forward", there has been no action. The Ministry of Justice added:

"A number of policy submissions to ministers, which included draft planning on possible ways forward on remote electronic voting, were developed following the government's November 2007 response to the Electoral Commission. However, these have not been developed further..."

The timelines suggest that the policy options developed after November 2007 were all dropped, with the result that the 2008 consultation was simply a means of delaying any formal announcement that the policy was dead.

Ironic really

That it was not until its final weeks in office in 2010 that the government set out its response to the 2008 consultation is another indicator that it never intended to move forward with any action.

The most likely explanation is that government appetite for any kind of electoral experimentation ended after widespread media coverage of fraud cases involving postal ballots in 2004 and 2005.

Seemingly unable to publicly make a case for reform that distinguished between the different forms of modernisation it was piloting, and unwilling to introduce some of the security reforms favoured by the Commission, the government was left with no where to go.

The ironies in this history of policy failure abound.

The government created the Electoral Commission to oversee elections and ensure public confidence in the system, yet appears to have lost confidence in the recommendations of its own watchdog.

And when the government announced its plans for "an e-enabled election some time after 2006", it had no means of making that a reality.

Yet in April 2008 the government mandated that any electoral registration data held on electronic systems must be formatted in compliance with a new set of common standards by December 1, 2009 in order to support internet general elections in future.

But then during 2009 the government changed its mind and agreed to implement the Electoral Commission's call for individual voter registration – which the watchdog had said was a precondition for future internet voting.

Yet after acceding to this request, the government then realised it had to rethink its work on the electoral registration data standards in order to cope with it.

So by adopting one of the enhancements needed to make internet voting more secure, the government sabotaged its own plans to make internet voting technically possible.

Given that it will be 2015 at least before full individual registration is introduced, and assuming four-year parliaments, the first "e-enabled" general election looks like being in 2018 at the earliest (optimistically assuming further work is done on internet voting in parallel with the registration change) – 12 years later than it was first proposed.

I suppose that does still count as "some time after 2006" though.

Other posts in this trilogy:

A history of internet voting from 2000 to 2010

Full text of the internet voting freedom of information request and response