[Article] EU e-voting site 'is a turn-off': report

dahamsta

EU e-voting site 'is a turn-off': report

Forrester Research claims that the EU's e-Vote Web site may actually have a negative effect upon public perceptions of the Internet as a democratic agent.
The e-Vote site, evote.eu2003.gr, was established by the Greek Presidency of the EU and is supported by the European Commission. The site offers visitors the opportunity to vote on issues relating to the current and future role of the EU and also invites people to vote on issues such as the current crisis in Iraq. The site claims that it is encouraging people to use the Internet and to get involved in discussions and decision-making in the EU.

"I can only speculate that the organisers set up the site to increase participation in democracy," said Jaap Favier, director of research at Forrester, speaking to ElectricNews.net. "But democracy doesn't lend itself to this experiment and we believe that it may be counter-productive and will turn people off."

Although the site is meant to promote voting among European citizens, it has no way of checking the identity of the voter, or whether voters have provided their actual country of citizenship when voting. It also has no way of preventing people from voting more than once on the same issue.

Forrester notes that the site asks visitors to become sponsors of the site by creating links from their own sites to that of e-Vote, but does not place restrictions on the wording of these links. Links could be made from commercial sites, implying a link between these companies and e-voting in the EU.

"The site could be setting themselves up for a nasty association, because the EU doesn't want democracy to be associated with big capital," said Favier.

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The last couple of quoted paragraphs are just silly, but aside from that I guess they have a point. Still though, I think it's an interesting concept, and possibly a valuable experiment. Experiments don't have to be successful to prove a hypothesis.

adam

commie comrade

it is a useful experiment but will they take the votes into account?
is it likely that by voting on this website your views will have an impacy on how the eu is run? Or is a flse pretense that will make people consider that they have a say?