Digital Democracy allows the electorate to express
there view easily from the comfort of there home.
This is likely to have a positive impact
on turnout and political education.
The fall in turnout may have been a consequence of the
failure to keep up to date with the ‘information society’.
Access to information
'New' technology massively enlarges citizens' access to
information, making possible, for the first time, a truly free
exchange of ideas and views.
The internet already makes available to private
citizens specialist information that was once only
available to government
E-democracy could create a genuinely two-way
democratic process, in which citizens become active
participants in politics rather than passive recipients
Ease of organization
Virtual referendums using electronic democracy would be
cheaper and easier to organize, and so could be held much more
frequently, this would increase Direct Democracy in the UK.
Traditional Referendums uses
significant time, cost and resources
Electoral malpractice
Making voting easy and convenient by
using the internet and telephone is open to
scrutiny and the potential lack of security.
There have been allegations of
malpractice and corruptions in
using the postal vote.
By using a physical vote people
identity can be effectively check and
the process of voting can be ‘policed’.
Virtual democracy
E-democracy threatens to turn the
democratic process into a series of
push-button referendums.
This would further erode the 'public' dimension of political participation,
reducing democratic citizenship to a series of consumer choices
This would demean politics,
turning it into something
resembling voting in Big Brother
Digital divide
There is not universal access to the
new information and communication
technology.
There would be a political inequality,
as the ‘information rich’ came to
dominate the ‘information poor’.