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Electronic democracy

Feb 2001

Northern Ireland (or Norn Iron to the locals) has often been selected as a trial site for many technologies before wider deployment on the British mainland. It had the first all digital network and was the first part of the UK for all the cables between exchanges to be replaced by optical fibre. It was therefore a great disappointment when the ‘Peace referendum’ was still run using paper voting slips. Electronic voting is a well-proven technology and its introduction in the UK is long overdue, avoiding the long delays and frequent recounts of the antiquated current system. Electronic voting is an important step in electronic democracy but there is much more to democracy than just casting votes every few years.

The UK Government Direct initiative aims to bring a single point of call for administrative functions, linking all departments together for a streamlined operation, very commendable. Some long term privacy issues await resolution or even adequate recognition. We often doubt the competence of our governments, but generally agree that at least they are not malicious. Long may this last, but with digital archiving of more or less complete records of every citizen, these will remain on tap in principle for ever. If there were ever to be a malicious administration, they will have access to integrated information on every citizen dating back many years, and in an easy to use form, quickly permitting identification of anyone they may consider possible threats.

But it is just this sort of information that is essential if we are every to get true electronic democracy and it is a price that we may have to pay, while trying to make appropriate safeguards. Abraham Lincoln defined democracy as government of the people by the people for the people. I suspect that if he made the definition today he may have said the same thing. But in 20 years from now, making the same definition may prove inadequate. By then we will share our world with conscious and very artificially intelligent machines. Today’s movement to protect the rights of at least the higher forms of animals such as apes may well have born fruit by then too. Those that we think of as part of the population will therefore be more than just people. A 2020 Abraham Lincoln may define democracy as government of the population for the population by the population. Certainly, it may well be the case that the best decisions may be made by machine by then, and it may be possible to make sure they have no bias. Power may corrupt people, but we don’t yet know about machines. It may be possible to make a machine that could determine what everyone wants on an issue and to take all their views fairly into account when deciding what is best overall – maybe the greatest good for the greatest number, or whatever criteria we agree on.

Using even today’s technology it would be possible to build a huge database that records the preferences of every individual in the society. We may start with a long list of options could select all the default choices at once by choosing a party, and then change those particular points where we may have a differing view. This preference list doesn’t have to be as simple as a tick list, we could choose algorithms, specify conditions, ifs and buts. We could state how strongly we care about something. In this way, we could build an electronic political shadow of ourselves. We could access and modify this at any time. By inspection of all the shadows, and running any algorithms, a government would then know what the population want, effectively a referendum on every issue without everyone having to go out and vote. A machine could effectively represent the views of the population using this information. This capability has not yet been used, but there is no longer any good reason. If we truly want democracy, we need this sort of input. Otherwise we just elect a few representatives who can totally ignore our wishes for several years after we have counted the votes. Maybe eventually we could build a totally unbiased governor, a fly-by-wire democracy, but we will probably want to retain human controls for many years. Good government cannot always be about counting votes. As yet we have no where near enough understanding of how to make decisions for the greatest good. Complete automation of government may be quite some time off. If our existing governors realised this, they might stop treating such systems as a potential threat to their jobs and start reaping the enormous benefits that electronic democracy could bring.