KEY POINTS:
I confess I was among the majority who didn't vote in the recent local body elections.
It's not that I have no interest in what goes on in my neck of the woods (central Wellington). It's just that I was busy with other things.
A letter came in the mail in the run-up to the election. I still haven't opened it. Nor have I opened the bills from Sky TV, Telecom and Genesis Energy it is buried beneath.
That's because, where possible, I organise my life - pay bills, book flights, check my bank balance - on the internet. And if I could vote on the internet, I'd probably have had a say in who is going to run Wellington for the next three years.
Voter apathy is a real problem in New Zealand. Only 41 per cent of people eligible to vote actually did so last weekend, down from 46 per cent three years ago. That's a scarily low figure when you consider the big, expensive issues councils make decisions on.
There will now be a Government investigation into the feasibility of voting online or by text message. That sounds like a splendid idea.
We've heard a lot about e-government in the past few years, but what has it really delivered? There's the e-government portal where you can search a mass of information. I think I've visited it twice in three years. The Companies Office does a good job delivering digital documents for businesses and the IRD can receive online payments.
That's reasonable progress, but the best example of e-government so far was the move by Statistics New Zealand last year to allow the Census to be filled in online. Around 250,000 people did so, saving officers from returning to many households to collect handwritten forms.
The Census is actually a bigger job to organise than voting in a general or local body election. So technically, e-voting is possible now. The only thing preventing it is the risk of election fraud or miscounting.
The most memorable thing about the 2000 US presidential election was the controversy over vote counting in Florida, where the result sat on a knife edge. E-voting needs to be 100 per cent accurate, more accurate that electronic banking even, which is a constant target of fraudsters.
Until a way can be found to ensure a voter's identity and that their vote is genuine, paper ballots will continue.
But would e-voting increase voter turn-out anyway? I think so. It comes down to convenience and finding a better way to engage with voters. The web is a much better forum to discuss complex policy issues, and lay out the facts and various points of view in full.
New Zealand politicians have, with a few exceptions - National leader John Key being one of them - been slow in using the web to interact with voters.
Across the Tasman, where the Australian Government is also considering e-voting to improve voter participation, a new political party that claims it will open up all its decisions to internet voting has been formed.
The Senator On-Line Party, which is looking for a place in the Australian senate, promises to let anyone registered on the electoral roll cast a vote via its website on Parliamentary bills.
The idea, says party founder Berge Der Sarkissian, is to make the senate more of a house of review, rather than a house of rubber stamps.
Anyone who has shaken their head at the ability of a few minor parties to push legislation through our own house of representatives might find the SOL party's policy attractive. I may not have felt strongly enough about the anti-smacking legislation to sign a petition against it or complain to my local MP, but I'd certainly vote against it online, right between checking my Trade Me watchlist and checking out some new video clips on Youtube.
