Web Roots Democracy Festival
On Monday 16th 2020 I had the pleasure of participating in WebRoots Democracy’s event on ‘Online Voting’ as part of their Democracy Festival. The event was hosted by the director of WebRoots Democracy, Areeq Chowdhury.
I was joined by University of Birmingham Academic, Professor Mark Ryan, Max Beverton-Palmer, from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and fellow RSBC Youth Forum member, Charlotte McMillan.
WebRoots Democracy is a think tank that is lead by young people with a focus on the intersection of political participation and technology. WebRoots explores how we can modernise democracy.
As part of this debate of modernising and enhancing democracy, the issue of accessible voting comes up and is an issue which WebRoots have focused on throughout the last six years.
As a visually impaired young person, I believe that the option of online voting in Local and General Elections is needed to ensure that I can vote independently.
In my past experiences of voting in elections, I have had to rely on the help of a family member or volunteer at the polling station to read out my options and mark the right box. This has often resulted in me not being able to vote confidentially or independently which has often left me feeling upset that I cannot have the same experience of voting as an able-bodied individual would. I am particularly frustrated as a History and Politics student because of my knowledge regarding the importance of voting and the impact my vote can have. In addition, due to how inaccessible voting can be, I believe that this has exacerbated voter apathy and fatigue. Hence, online voting would help combat this issue amongst not only the VI and disabled community, but also the wider community because of how tech oriented society is these days.
While I realise that online voting does pose issues of coercion and other security concerns, I hope that in elections to come, online voting is integrated into each election for the benefit of all visually impaired and blind individuals. With most things in life, there are risks but I believe that with further research, online voting can be implemented in years to come.