Polling Stations and Electronic Voting

Sam Mezec put this comment on Facebook.

“In 2016 I brought a proposition to the States Assembly to get agreement that polling stations . election time should be based in the most convenient locations for voters and that voters should be able to vote at any polling station. Every single Constable voted against that proposition. Every Single One.”

It is useful to look at the detail on Hansard, and it becomes painfully obvious that it depended on the introduction at the very least of electronic voting machines if not online voting..

Surely you need to get that in place in a proposition before bringing something which depends on it to the assembly? Regardless of its merits, it was not surprising it got voted down, not because of the bad Constables, but because it was badly presented. 

As Len Norman said: “I suggest we may not quite be ready for this and it will cause chaos, until the electronic system is in place.”

But where was that in the proposition? Nowhere to to be seen. It is like voting for air routes before an airport and runways have been built (both of which would need planning permission), as the cliche puts it, putting the cart before the horse.

A Reasonable Excluse?
Len Norman was Chairman of PPC and said Sam didn’t bring it up at a meeting. Apparently he did email Len Norman but got no reply. Why he couldn’t then telephone, or arrange to meet face to face, if he was about to bring about a proposition, I don’t know. I do know how easy it is to be swamped by emails, and for one to go missing. If he'd said.... I saw him face to face but he wouldn't talk about it, that would be a different matter.

Poll Cards and Costs

Everyone kept saying that the cost of the polling card in the UK was free. I’ve checked the accounts for 2015, and Royal Mail charged for their delivery. It has a price list. It even notes that:

“For example, where poll cards for a UK Parliamentary election are combined with poll cards for a district council election, half of the cost of printing and delivery will be charged to the Consolidated Fund and half to the local authority.”

The electoral commission noted that in that year, £9.85m was spent in poll cards for UK elections!

So the costing by Len Norman, while perhaps higher than it could have been (as envelopes would not be required) would certainly not be free, any more than it is in the UK.

I still think Philip Ozouf’s idea of an electronic reminder is far better. I get that from my dentist – a text message and an email, it’s all set up on an automatic system, and in this electronic age, surely that’s the way to improve matters.

Electronic Registers and Different Districts

Sam Mézec’s preamble (as noted by Deputy Wickenden) assumes technology to allow different polling stations to be used – so why isn’t that in the proposition itself, as it is clearly a major dependency.

The logistics of different districts is well laid out by Len Norman. The problem with current electoral registers is well laid out by Philip Ozouf. These are solved at a stroke by electronic systems.

The preamble by Sam notes:

“It would mean a move away from paper systems, onto a computer-based system where information on who has already voted is updated on an interactive database in real-time to ensure that voters are not able to vote at one polling station, then walk to another station and vote again. Such a system would not need to be online, but instead on a secure intranet which would be unhackable.”

So why didn’t he have a proposition to get that in place, rather than pushing for a change without that in the proposition itself? It is, as Len Norman and others said, poorly worded. No wonder it didn’t get through!

eGov and Electronic Voting

Sadly the technology has been extremely slow off the ground. This was 2016, and two years down the line, eGov is still not delivering.

Which brings us back to electronic systems, even (if not online) a connected intranet of electronic voting machines, as Sam mentions (but not in the proposition itself). 

This is perfectly feasible, but no progress at all has been made since 2016. It would be interesting to know how far Russell Labey is now getting with this. Under Len Norman we had applying to be on the voting register online, and streaming of States sittings. So what's happening now? The eGov project – not to be confused with Digital Jersey, which is entirely separate – simply isn’t happening. Deputy Wickenden says “I did inform the Deputy that this work is already underway.” So what happened to it? Over to you, Russell!

Voting Slips and Electoral Fraud

Deputy Tadier’s print on demand assumes the slips can also be numbered uniquely, and a counterfoil kept in a way which happens now in case a check is needed to be made against possible voting fraud etc. It’s a messy fudge. A booklet of counterfoils is far less likely to go astray than loose ones printed on demand. When you vote, your number goes on the voting slip and the counterfoil, so that should fraud be considered, it is possible to backtrack and match voting slips to the electoral roll, and also to ensure that the number of slips given out matches that recorded on the booklet – and none have gone astray. There are lots of other checks and counterchecks in the voting count, but this is an important one.

An electronic voting system keeps an audit trail of votes cast, which is essential to prevent fraud, and which can be checked. An interim fudge does not do this.

Proposition and Debate

Sam Mezec:

"The States are asked to decide whether they are of opinion - (a) that each registered voter should be issued a polling card in advance of an election; (b) that voters should be able to vote at any polling station; (c) that the location of polling stations should be reviewed by the Privileges and Procedures Committee to ensure that the polling stations are at the most convenient locations within each constituency; and to request the Privileges and Procedures Committee to bring forward the necessary legislative amendments to implement these changes in time for the May 2018 general election."


"Part (b) which is that voters should be able to vote at any polling station, now there might be some discussion here in that there are some practicalities you would have to get over because making sure that it is impossible for somebody to go to one polling station, vote, and then quickly run down the road to another polling station to vote again is something that of course we must absolutely not allow to happen. But Guernsey does this."

"So take my constituency, for example, where residents of Hue Court would have to go to Springfield Stadium to vote when they live just a few metres away from the Town Hall, St. Helier No. 1’s polling station, which they live closer to than virtually everybody in St. Helier No. 1 does. So to allow those people to vote at whichever polling station is most convenient, I think as long as we can come up with a secure way of doing it, which I am assured is relatively easy to do, you just need to put the effort in and make sure it gets done, then I would hope that would be something that the Assembly could support on the principle of making it easier to vote."

The Connétable St. Clement:

I can explain to Deputy Lewis why P.P.C. have not brought forward this proposition. Because 2 of the 3 requests in the proposition are already covered in the Public Elections (Jersey) Law, as I shall explain in a moment, and the third one, as Deputy McClinton said, is already in train.

Deputy Mézec is a member of the Privileges and Procedures Committee, and I hope he will not mind me saying that I find him a very valuable member of that committee. So I think it is a pity that he has chosen not to raise these issues at committee but rather come straight to the States with this proposition.

I say it is a pity because each of the suggestions in the proposition has merit. In fact, they all have significant merit but, sadly, the wording of the proposition and the report attached to the proposition raises more questions than it answers.

Taking each in turn, firstly, the Deputy suggests that each registered voter should be issued with a polling card in advance of the election. That is welcome and sensible. But the Deputy does not say whether this is in addition to the notice to be sent by the Parishes to each voter in general election year under Article 7A of the Public Elections (Jersey) Law. Now, that was an Article this House, this Assembly, put into the law after the last election. If I recall, it became effective after the last election, so it has never been used yet.

But what the Deputy was saying, he was concerned, understandably, that people did not know whether they were on the electoral list or not, unless they got a polling card. They will know when they get this notice under Article 7A, which will give them all the information they need. It is not called a polling card, it is called a notice, but that is already in the Public Elections (Jersey) Law under Article 7A. So it does seem to me that then doing polling card on top of that seems to be a duplication of effort and expenditure.

The Deputy, in his proposition, does not say if this card is to be sent out in the event of by-elections. Presumably, it is. Does it also include elections for Centenier and Procureur, which also come under the Public Elections (Jersey) Law? Presumably so, but the proposition does not mention the public elections or the Public Elections (Jersey) Law. It merely mentions elections. So will it have to include elections for Vingtenier, Constable’s Officers, Roads Committee members, members of the Rates Assessment Committee, roads inspectors? I assume not, but the proposition is certainly unclear.

In his report, the Deputy calls the cost of these polling cards, and he said it again: “A drop in the ocean.” There are currently more than 64,000 registered voters. Each will have a card posted to them, so the cost will be somewhere in the region of £100,000 each time the cards are sent to every voter.

When you take into account the cost of postage, envelopes, because they are presumably not going to be sent out without envelopes, so that everybody can see who lives at what address and so on, and of course, staff time. I really do not call that a drop in the ocean.

The Deputy need not worry about whether, if he does not return his electoral form every year, that he is just going to drop off because, under the Public Elections (Jersey) Law, after 3 years, if one has not sent in his electoral form then the Constable has to write to that person to advise them they are going to be removed if they do not respond. But every effort is made by the Public Elections (Jersey) Law and by the Parish Halls, to make sure that people are not taken off the electoral list until every effort has been made to notify them.

The Deputy also asks that voters should be able to vote at any polling station. That is an excellent idea, and something we are working towards. We all want to make it easier for people to vote, but until voters are checked off the electoral list as they vote electronically, this would be a recipe for disaster. When we have the electronic list, fine. But until then I think there is a recipe for chaos.

It may work in an Isle of Wight election or referendum, where the same candidates and the same questions are voted on at each polling station.

When, for example, a St. Clement, say, presents himself at St. Ouen, it will be perfectly possible for the Autorisé at St. Ouen to phone St. Clement, check the validity of the voter’s credentials and that he has not already voted, issue him with a Senatorial and referendum ballot paper which for St. Ouen will hold exactly the same ballot papers that are held at the other polling station. Then the St. Clement Autorisé can cross him off the list; job done.

But when voting for Deputies or Constables, it will be necessary for every polling station to hold voting slips from every other polling station, and then have some mechanism for them to be distributed after the polls have closed from every polling station to possibly every other polling station, and there are usually about 17 of these. I suggest we may not quite be ready for this and it will cause chaos, until the electronic system is in place.

Finally, the location of polling stations, and I understand what Deputy Mézec is saying about that. Wherever you put a polling station, you move one and it will be more convenient for others, less convenient for others. That is the nature of things. But there is already a mechanism for this under Article 26 of the Public Elections (Jersey) Law. An excerpt from it: “The electoral administrator for the Parish where the poll is held shall provide one or more polling stations in such a way that the Autorisé is satisfied that all persons have reasonable facilities for the exercise of their right to vote.” So what the Deputy wants already exists under the law, and I do not think it should be a role of P.P.C., a political body, to substitute its opinion for that of the independent Autorisé.

As I said, all of these suggestions have merit, considerable merit, significant merit, but, as always, associated problems. If the States approve this proposition, P.P.C. will have to implement them despite some of the problems which I hope I have identified. Better, I suggest, would be for the proposition to be withdrawn or rejected by the States, and the Deputy bring these matters to the Committee on which he sits for proper and mature consideration. [Acclamation]

Deputy S.M. Wickenden:

Before the Deputy lodged his proposition, he very kindly contacted me first to get my views on what I thought about this on a digital level, on is it possible on what is there. I did inform the Deputy that this work is already underway, which he has mentioned within his proposition.

But it did shock me that the fact that I said that we are already speaking with the Law Officers, we are already speaking with all the relevant people to get this piece of work to happen, still meant that the proposition was lodged.

But I do thank the Deputy for supporting my team, the eGov team, in the work they are doing towards this very fact. We are looking at this and the Deputy, in his report, rightfully says that it has to be electronic. The way that we currently do our polling, our electoral roll-call map now, would not allow us to do what the Deputy is asking us for. So that work is happening.

There are 2 streams. There is the core eGov stream that is going to happen, that is looking at the wider picture for our little democracy and the way that we deal and work with our constituents and residents of Jersey in a digital format from Government. But there is also a piece to try and get something in place to allow us to use the data we currently have at the next elections, and that is something that I am passionate about, making sure that we have this electoral roll in a digital format in a way that when you cross it off in one place it is crossed off the other.

There are challenges, as the Connétable says, about Deputy positions, making sure that they have the correct polling card, that is marked for their Parish or their District. There could be a way of printing it off. I am not going to solutionise it right here and now. But then, after that, I think that the Connétable was right to be saying this, how do you get those votes in time to the polling stations doing the counting for that District, so they can all be counted in one place? So there are some challenges around here. I think the Connétable was absolutely right in what he was saying about the challenges there.

But, obviously, the polling cards, again, people are told about this in the Election Law, but is there a way of making it even clearer, that the Deputy has mentioned in his proposition? Possibly there is. Is the cost right? Well, I think we would have to look at that. But in there it says, I think this should be last on the one, because if we can get polling stations anywhere and you can vote anywhere, the polling card itself does not need to say where you can vote. It just says: “Go to a polling station.”

So I would like to say, this work is happening. We are looking at making this happen for the next elections. The conversation has been going on for 6 months in different areas to make sure that we are in the right place for it by the next elections. So I thank very much the Deputy in supporting the work that my team is doing towards making this happen, and thank you very much.

Deputy S.M. Brée:

There is some merit in what this proposition is trying to achieve. There are a lot of questions about it. How is it going to work? Will it work? How on earth are you going to get an electronic voting system that is secure, robust, communicates well with central servers in place in time for anybody to go into any polling station and effectively use an electronic terminal, which will not only register their vote but register the fact they have voted in the election that they are entitled to vote in. So there are a lot of questions.

Deputy Tadier

It could well be, and it has been suggested, that of course it will be much easier for voters to be able to vote at any polling station with some degree of electronic digital backup for that. It would absolutely be necessary to at least have an intranet system between all of the polling stations so that in real time you know who has voted and who has not voted so that we do not get a duplication of voting; that, of course, goes without saying and I think that is well within the current technology that exits. It also stands to reason that in the future we may want to consider having electronic voting machines alongside the traditional methods of casting a vote.


But I do take on board the comments that have been said: “Well, what about the practical elements of the ballot papers?” Would we have to have ballot papers for all of the Deputies and all the Constables in every polling station? Well, that depends on the method that is chosen of course. If you have an integrated system, computer linked up to a printer with the correct type of paper you can, of course, just print a ballot paper securely on demand so you do not need to have all these excess ballot papers. We know that there will be ballot papers left over at any one time because turnout is not 100 per cent. It is much less than 50 per cent. So why are we printing ballot papers unnecessarily when, of course, you could probably just have a system where ... specialised printer, you print the ballot paper out for the relevant constituency as and when you need it. That is just one idea and I am sure that P.P.C., when they look at this, will be able to put more meat on the bones and they will tell us whether it is possible to do it for 2018.

Philip Ozouf

Voter confidentiality and voter safety is of the highest importance for the integrity of the voting system. The voting system has to work. It has to be effective. It has to be equal. It has to have voter equality to the greatest extent possible and there has to be voter equity and there has to be a massive change, I am afraid, in the way that effectively the electoral registers are compiled.

The good news is that technology can do a lot of that. It can do a lot of the heavy lifting and it can do a lot of the real offsetting of the controls that exist which are the concerns previously of people simply popping into any single voting station where you do not know them.

Parish people know their people because if they do not they will find out who they are. There are risks, I am afraid, with anybody going to any single polling station and being unknown. Yes, they can show some form of I.D. but where are the controls in Deputy Mézec’s proposal in dealing with these issues? There is an issue. We all want everybody to vote. We all want to get more people out to vote but there is the issue of voter fraud and what has happened in other countries, being very real issue.

I say to Deputy Mézec, he is on a committee and if he is committed to voter reform and getting the electoral registers properly organised in an electronic way, harnessing the power of technology, then he will be working to find a solution and coming forward with not a proposition that is just an expression of a desire with no evidence, with no offsetting issues of controls, and he is not going to like it. I know he is not going to like it, but I am not prepared to vote in favour of something which is not effectively properly worked out, complete in dealing with all the modalities that need to happen for the voter registration and the voter safety.

In the U.K. polling cards are dealt with freely by the post office. They are delivered free with other election materials and we had discussions with the Jersey Post to do it. The reality is that postal cards are not things that people communicate with. I do not communicate by letter and post; I communicate by email. I want a smart phone. I want a message on my phone which basically comes up and says: “You are entitled to vote tomorrow.”

Not only is that better and more effective and safer but it is also going to be much more cheaply and effectively dealt with. Those are the things that you do if you want to improve voter turnout and voter participation. It is by harnessing electronically, by having a common database which Deputy Wickenden is doing valiant work on with other people and Digital Jersey and his eGov Team. You do that and you reform the whole system and can we do things by 2018; yes, we can but let us not come forward with piecemeal propositions that are just used as a stick to come and bash P.P.C. later with to say: “No, you have not done this.”

Sam Mezec

In terms of the polling cards, I mentioned in my opening remarks that this is something that has been done in the U.K. since 1948. The figure of £100,000 was floated for how much it would cost. I mean I have never heard something so ridiculous. Of course it is not going to cost that much. It does not cost much money to get something put in a postal drop when that is being combined with what is already being put out in a postal drop anyway. The card is cheap. You can print labels to put different names on it and one was that they would have to go in envelopes because you would give away the identity of the people living there. Well, what do they think is going to be on the envelope? The name and address. It is utterly ridiculous. When you get them in the Isle of Man or you get them in the U.K. or other jurisdictions you get just the card through the post because there is no confidential information on it that would not also be on the cover of an envelope as well.

The work, as Deputy Wickenden said, is being done to look at the technological side of it. I am not someone who has a great grasp of computer technology and programming and whatever but my father does it professionally and I talk to him about it and sort of get ideas about what different ways there are to do it because computer programming, in many ways, can often be more like arts than like a science. I am sure Deputy Wickenden knows what I am talking about there in terms of how you approach creating systems to deal with these issues.