Voting - as an example

I've used voting as an illustration of what can be done with Transformational Government thinking. Voting has been around a long time and the way we live now has changed, e.g. we tend to move long distances and not know our neighbours. Before the first world war voting security depended on recognising people in the community centres used for voting, whereas now there is a greater reliance on paper evidence. As remarked by the recent Electoral Commision report; e-Voting and it’s partner postal voting have been looked at as new, more convenient, channels to the existing process for voting rather than ways of making voting work in the 21st century.

A study by a Manchester councillor a few years ago demonstrated that the electoral register was not accurate, houses that had been demolished were still there and some new houses weren’t. Actually voting is only one of many reasons for needing to know where people live and registering to vote not a particularly compelling reason to register ones address. It's obvious that having different processes for registering where one lives and ones eligibility is inefficient, irritating and prone to fraud; for example it can't be long before there's a host of completely new processes to register for different waste disposal requirements. Going back to voting, without too much deep analysis the most important characteristics for voting are:

• Entitlement is geographic (e.g. local. National constituency etc. elections)
• Everyone entitled should be invited to vote, so contact details are important
• Only the person who is entitled to vote should do so
• The person who votes should not be pressured into who they vote for
• Voting should be equally convenient for all (to prevent bias)

It seems obvious that if government was confident about who lived where, i.e. had a trustworthy address service, voting and a host of other services could be provided more securely and conveniently.

In designing an address service Transformational Government thinking would guide one to look at involving intermediaries, for example, Royal Mail deliver post to people at the addresses where they live and manage the Post Code Address file. So why not involve them in a shared service to map where people live. There are privacy issues, but that’s also true with the patchwork quilt of processes that exist now. Voting would then be one of the requirements for a shared service for identifying who lives where and how that relates to geographic bounderies e.g. constituencies. It needn't be a national public service as envisaged a few years ago for the National Spatial Address Infrastructure and might well be delivered by public or private sector, local or regional organisations.

Knowing who is eligible to vote and how to contact them is a good starting point for designing a voting system that works for mobile busy people, with e-Voting and postal voting as channel options in an modern voting system designed to balance security and convenience.