Crowdsourced Democracy and #e-Voting / ABC Far North
We routinely crowdsource ideas, products and opinions. The Indian government amassed 3 million comments over the past 18 months from its citizens through its portal – MyGov.In and social media seems to be constantly driving and spreading the political agenda.
With both a Queensland and Australian election imminent, ABC Far North’s Kier Shorey and I explored the notion of e-voting and digital political engagement.
Finland, France, Norway, Estonia, Spain and Australia have all trialed e-voting either allowing you to vote from wherever you are, or requiring you to go to a fixed polling booth to use a digital voting kiosk, but no country has adopted online voting exclusively, yet.
Some of the issues cited for this lack of adoption are security of votes from hackers, lack of apparent audit or scrutiny trails, privacy issues, lack of political desire to change and lack of voter desire, which are the traditional reasons for not wanting to change anything.
It seems obvious that in the next few decades we will all vote on-line and romantically reminisce of the good old pencil and paper days.
This year in Australia upwards of 80% of all Census forms will be completed online, a notion a decade ago that would have seemed almost impossible.
With the political wind blowing over Australia this year and the growing digital everything world we live in, this is a timely debate and one that eventually we will need to tackle and resolve.
Have a listen now (11 minutes 29 seconds) and then cast your vote for e-voting….
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What does the evidence say about e-voting’s impact on electoral participation and security?
E-voting evidence since 2016 reveals a divided field: Estonia’s long-running internet voting system is the most cited success case — internet voting has operated successfully since 2005, accounting for over half of votes cast in recent elections, with no confirmed security incidents that have affected outcomes; but the security community’s concerns about e-voting (the difficulty of combining ballot secrecy with the verifiability required to prove correct vote counting, the vulnerability of internet-connected systems to nation-state cyber attack, and the risk that vulnerabilities might not be detectable before or during an election) have not been resolved, and several jurisdictions that experimented with e-voting have returned to paper ballots; and Australia’s own electoral technology journey (the iVote system used in NSW, which was found to have security vulnerabilities) illustrates that the security challenges are not theoretical. The fundamental tension is that paper voting has properties (physical verifiability, no remote attack surface, understandable by non-experts) that electronic systems have not yet replicated.
Q: What does crowdsourced democracy and digital civic participation actually deliver?
Digital civic participation platforms have delivered: increased access to information about policy proposals and decision-making processes for engaged citizens; specific crowdsourced policy development successes (Iceland’s constitutional crowdsourcing process, vTaiwan’s consensus-building platform) that have demonstrated that structured digital deliberation can produce legitimate policy inputs; and improved consultation infrastructure for local government and planning processes where the geographic distribution of affected residents makes in-person participation impractical. What digital civic participation has not delivered: the concern that online civic engagement platforms amplify the voices of those already engaged (educated, urban, younger) at the expense of those already marginalised in political processes has proven well-founded; and the vulnerability of online civic spaces to coordinated manipulation (bot accounts, astroturfing, disinformation campaigns) is a structural challenge that partially offsets the participation gains.
Q: What does the digital democracy trajectory reveal about the relationship between technology and democratic health?
The digital democracy relationship is not straightforwardly positive or negative but context-dependent: the same digital infrastructure that enables informed civic participation (access to information, connection to fellow citizens, tools for collective action) also enables disinformation at scale, manipulation of public discourse, and the fragmentation of shared factual reality that democratic deliberation requires; the platforms that host civic conversation (Facebook, Twitter/X, YouTube) have incentive structures that reward engagement over accuracy and division over consensus, which is systematically corrosive to the deliberative quality of public discourse; and the genuine democratic innovations enabled by digital technology (direct participation tools, transparency infrastructure, access to public data) are real but have been outpaced by the democratic degradation enabled by the same infrastructure. Technology is not the solution to the democratic challenges it has contributed to creating.
Q: How can I book Morris Misel for a democracy and governance, digital citizenship, or civic futures keynote?
Contact the booking team at morrismisel.com/event-organisers.
We routinely crowdsource ideas, products and opinions. The Indian government amassed 3 million comments over the past 18 months from its citizens through its portal – MyGov.In and social media seems to be constantly driving and spreading the political agenda. With both a Queensla.
When signals like Crowdsourced Democracy and #e-Voting / ABC Far North emerge, organisations that engage early have the advantage of choosing their response rather than reacting to events. That gap between those who prepared and those who did not is where competitive positioning is actually made or lost.
The most important question is not whether Crowdsourced Democracy and #e-Voting / ABC Far North will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
