Grumbles from the Pulpit: Electronic Voting in the Fullness of Time

"Indeed it is, beyond question, at the appropriate juncture, in due course, in the fullness of time." (Yes Prime Minister)

I'd like to award the last President of PPC, Russell Labey, the 2021 Jim Hacker Award for procrastination. I've just been reading this on the Vote.Je website and am amazed that a proposition was agreed in 2016. 

It is now 2021, just over 5 years since the proposition from Geoff Southern was passed, and "a lot of work and research needs to be done" is almost as good as the quote from Jim Hacker in "Yes Minister" above. It is preposterous that it takes five years to do.... absolutely nothing! 

Let's face it, while Russell was very keen to change the electoral districts and boot the Senators out of the States, when it came to actually introducing a better voting system... and one which would easily allow a single transferable vote, making voting far more fair, you can forget it.

Russell has now moved on to higher things. He's become a Minister. Just like Mr Hacker.

From Vote.Je

You can’t vote electronically at the current time. On the 22nd March 2016, the States agreed to an amended proposition from Deputy G.P. Southern of St. Helier, which asked the Privileges and Procedures Committee, together with the Comité des Connétables, and other government bodies, to research and trial electronic voting systems to introduce a safe and secure mechanism to enable eligible voters to vote electronically. We intend to amend the Law to make electronic voting possible, but online voting gives rise to concerns about the risks of electoral fraud and how the secrecy of the ballot can be guaranteed, because people will be voting outside the supervised environment of the polling station.

An alternative option would be to introduce electronic voting within polling stations. In jurisdictions where this happens, voting machines print a paper receipt every time a vote is registered electronically so that re-counts can be conducted and the electronic count can be compared with a paper count.

A lot of work and research needs to be done before we can introduce electronic voting, to be sure that any such system processes data accurately and securely and to ensure that the voting public and candidates can be confident of the integrity of the voting process.