The improvement of voter’s right by the internet

Government in democracies is always thoughtful to enable better and free elections
to every citizen. Why should not the internet be used in order to reach this goal?

Voting online could make it easier for voters to express their personal opinion in some countries were free speech is not given. No one would be able to know for example who the face behind the voting paper was. Personal manipulation would be almost impossible since no one would hand in his voting paper to an official canvasser. Not to fear the actual voting process, would reduce the pressure that can be opposed by parties on their voters and in the same way the force of corruption could be decreased. Voters could know with a certainty that it is almost impossible to reconstruct their identity after using a public computer for example.

Nowadays still a lot of countries in the world apply to the problems of oppressed elections. In Syria for example dissidents become jailed for their political engagement. Only because everyone has the right to vote, that does not mean there is a right for actual free expression of thoughts. According to an article published by BBC on the 22 April 2007 Syrian citizens seemed not strongly interested in the outcome of the elections in 2007 and former political prisoners were stripped of their civil rights and could not stand in the elections or vote.1 This power policy in Syria dominated by only one party leads to pressure in the population. If voting could be more anonymous, face to face or state to citizen pressure would be abandoned by online voting, maybe the political picture in Syria would undergo a surprisingly strongly and fast change.

An additional important point for the improvement in free elections is the flow of different information ensured by the World Wide Web. The information an individual can have excess to, is taken nowadays out of a much wider pool than newspapers and TV news were ever able to transmit. The Syrians, like all other citizens on the world would be able, under the requirements that they have the ability to read, to choose their source of information on their own and it might be much more difficult for a one party government or a dictator to limit the flow of information. Out of this base of free excess to all kind of information combined with anonymous online voting the outcome of elections should be much more likely to represent the real proportion of citizen opinion. According to the article by Jair Amichai Hamburger “E-empowerment: Empowerment by the Internet“, one of the first E-voting experiments brought surprisingly high success rates. “In the first binding political vote in Arizona in March, 2000, there was a 676% increase in voter turnout. Since then, many governments have considered the possibility of conducting national elections through E-voting. “2(Hamburger, p.4784)
Online voting would be a new step forward into the interconnection between reality and Internet, as well as a hopefully helpful tactic to improve democratic political systems.

1. BBC. (2007). Retrieved 24. 5. 2009 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6580517.stm
2. Yair Amichai-Hamburger, Katelyn Y Mckenna, Samuel-Azran Tal. empowerment: Empowerment by the Internet. Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 24, No. 5. (September 2008), pp. 1776-1789.