Story: Digital rights group slams e-voting

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A matter of scale

As we know from a recent election postal votes are far from secure.

It's a matter of scale. The best possible way of voting is in a booth with a piece of paper. Fairness dictates though that there has to be a way that housebound people or those who must be out of the country can vote, and the postal vote is the next best fix. Sadly there is the risk of fraud, but at worst it will be at a low level.

The postal vote shouldn't just be a free-for-all though, and I think that's where it went wrong. Able-bodied people who are in the country should not be allowed a postal vote. The fraud in the recent election involved large numbers of postal votes being collected en-masse from people who could perfectly well have gone out and voted properly.

If e-voting were to be made available to the housebound then I can't see that it would be a problem. The trouble is that instead of this it would be promoted as the new bright hope, and everybody would be encouraged to use it. The scale of coercion would be massive.

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