Two-thirds of disabled voters faced access difficulties at polling stations on election day. The charity Scope is calling for online voting to address the problem.
Since the 1992 General Election, disability charity Scope has run a campaign called Polls Apart, which aims to make elections more accessible to disabled voters. After voting at each General Election, disabled people are asked to complete a survey about the accessibility of their voting experience.
The Polls Apart campaign 2010 surveyed over 1,000 disabled people in constituencies throughout the UK. Researchers found that 67 per cent of polling stations had one or more significant access barriers to disabled voters. This represents just a 1 per cent improvement from the last General Election (68 per cent) and 2 per cent from the General Election of 2001 (69 per cent).
This meant that in 2010, many disabled people needed assistance to vote, and could not vote in the privacy of polling booths like other voters. Some disabled people were unable to vote at all.
Despite the widespread assumption that postal voting was the most accessible channel for disabled voters, almost half (47 per cent) of postal voters reported one or more significant problems. These ranged from the confusing and complicated instructions that accompanied the ballot to the difficulty postal voters faced in marking and folding and the paper into the small envelope provided.
One long-term solution being suggested by Scope is the introduction of online voting for disabled voters. Thirty five per cent of the disabled people surveyed in 2010 said they would like to be able to vote online.
Scope’s Ruth Scott told the BBC she supports online voting:
“In a digital age where people can vote by text for the X-Factor and shop and bank online, our voting system really needs to catch up.”
Online voting would certainly allow more disabled people to cast their votes independently and in safety, comfort and privacy.
This would also benefit non-disabled voters, and politics as a whole, as it would shorten the entire voting process. This may encourage more people to vote, particularly young, first time voters.
It is now to be hoped that the Scope report will be read by all politicians, and that serious thought will be given to allowing the option of online voting for everyone.
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13 Responses to “Online voting for disabled voters”
cim
If the voting system can be wrongly configured to do that, without the voter noticing, it’s not fit for purpose. I would want a lot of safeguards and independent scrutiny of the integrity of e-voting systems and software, obviously. Ideally, I think the source code of any e-voting software should be open for public inspection.
Certainly e-voting can be set up in a way that does not have those safeguards, and the USA has been doing so for some time, but this is not an inevitability.
I’ve written online voting software, and while there are definitely difficult problems to solve regarding identifying and authenticating voters (and it’s these that have made me very sceptical about e-voting in the past, and that I don’t think we’ll really be in a position to solve properly for another decade or so), it is really not that difficult to record a vote correctly, confirm to the voter that the vote has been recorded correctly, and provide a mechanism by which they can confirm that this vote was included in the count.
Mr. Sensible
I support this in principle, and indeed I think calls for this across the board have intencified following the situations that occured at some Polling Stations during the election.
Nevertheless, I think the points raised in the comments here are valid and should be looked at carefully. #
Jane Watkinson
RT @leftfootfwd: Online voting for disabled voters http://bit.ly/bt1fnb