With the General Election just over 3 weeks away there are predictions that voter turnout could be the worst in modern history. What’s more this apathy is most pronounced amongst younger voters.
The last election was in 2019 where the average turnout was 67.3%. Turnout tends to be higher in constituencies with a higher proportion of older residents with younger people citing that their needs are not being addressed as their reason for not voting.
Clearly politicians would do well to heed this and work must be done to make the whole voting process more attractive. Turning up at a dingy polling station to make a mark on a piece of paper, with a stubby pencil, must feel so old fashioned to generations that have grown up with online voting on TV shows.
To make matters worse it then takes an eternity for the ballot papers to be manually counted before the results can be announced! Maybe a phased modernisation is the way forward. We could put a line through the use of pencils and voters could use their stubby fingers instead on tablet devices.
Make no mistake though online voting will happen. Obviously there are security risks to overcome but the use of multi factor authentication or even fingerprint ID will eventually convince the traditionalists that this is the future of voting.