A democratic system should make room for people to think
The engineering of a future voting system is not something that should be decided by one person, one political group, one technology company, or one technical discipline.
That work belongs to administration, engineers, security specialists, accessibility experts, election officials, communities and, most importantly, the people who will actually have to use it.
Before designing the system, listen.
Listen to people who want online voting and people who distrust it.
Listen to people who feel safe walking into a polling station and people who do not.
Listen to disabled people, elderly people, young people, carers, parents, workers, people experiencing coercion, people with different political beliefs, and people who have stopped voting altogether.
Different perspectives expose different problems.
The objective is not to persuade people how to vote.
The objective is to create conditions in which they can make that decision for themselves.
Fear should not cast the ballot
A person who is frightened, intimidated, exhausted, overwhelmed or under pressure may not be making decisions in the same circumstances as someone who feels safe and has time to think.
That does not make them weak.
It means the environment matters.
Democracy should therefore provide a space in which a person can stop, think, interpret information carefully and make their own decision without unnecessary pressure from:
- political campaigns;
- family or community expectations;
- employers or institutions;
- crowds or intimidating environments;
- technological manipulation;
- surveillance;
- threats or coercion;
- or simply the stress of trying to fit voting into an already overloaded life.
A voting system should not require someone to overcome fear before they can participate in democracy.
The principle
Give every person a private, accessible and non-intimidating opportunity to decide what they actually believe.
That may eventually involve secure digital voting.
It may involve improved polling stations.
It may involve postal voting, quiet voting environments, accessibility support or methods that have not yet been developed.
The technology is secondary.
The principle comes first.
Build through conversation
No system should be deployed simply because its designers believe they have solved the problem.
Security specialists may identify technical risks.
Civil-liberties advocates may identify privacy risks.
Election officials may identify administrative problems.
Disabled people may identify barriers that nobody else noticed.
People who have experienced coercion may recognise dangers invisible to everyone else.
And ordinary voters may simply say:
“I would not feel comfortable using this.”
That information matters.
A democratic technology should therefore develop through continuous consultation, testing, criticism and revision.
Disagreement is useful information.
There is always another way to look
There is almost always another way forward if we give ourselves enough time to work it out.
That does not mean every problem has an easy answer.
It means we should resist the pressure to turn the first answer into an action simply because an answer is urgently wanted.
Do not rush. Keep working.
Listen.
Learn.
Communicate.
Understand what each perspective is trying to protect, achieve, avoid or explain.
Bring those perspectives together and look for the points where they genuinely agree.
Where they disagree, do not immediately treat the disagreement as an obstacle.
The disagreement may contain information that the current solution has missed.
Change the proposal.
Test it again.
Listen again.
Keep learning.
The aim is to build enough shared understanding that different perspectives can reach concord.
Concord does not mean everybody must hold the same opinion.
It means people have listened carefully enough to understand the consequences for one another and can reach a position that is sufficiently safe, fair, understandable and workable to become an action.
The process can be expressed simply:
Listen → Learn → Communicate → Understand → Compare → Adapt → Agree → Concord → Action
No perspective has to disappear for concord to exist.
The purpose is not to make everybody think the same way.
It is to understand enough of each other's perspective that we can avoid unnecessarily harming one group while trying to help another.
When an action will affect millions of different people, taking the time to understand those people is part of the engineering.
There is no prize for reaching the wrong answer quickly.
Simple, safe and relative to all
Whatever system eventually emerges should be judged against the lives of the people expected to use it.
It should be:
Simple enough to understand.
Safe enough to trust.
Accessible enough to use.
Private enough to protect freedom.
Flexible enough to accommodate different people.
Auditable enough to question and challenge.
And relative to the people and circumstances it exists to serve.
Technology should adapt to people wherever reasonably possible.
People should not have to reshape themselves around technology simply because administration finds that easier.
Why this matters
Fear can produce rapid reactions.
Safety gives people greater opportunity to reflect.
A functioning democracy should favour the conditions for reflection wherever possible.
Around the world we can already see the consequences that fear, distrust, polarisation and misunderstanding can have when they accumulate.
We should not have to wait for greater harm before learning from those signals.
Some lessons, learned too late, cannot be completely reversed.
People can be hurt.
Communities can fracture.
Knowledge can disappear.
And people whose perspective might have helped us understand a problem may no longer be here to contribute it.
That is why listening now matters.
Not because any one person has all the answers.
Because none of us does.
A simple design test
Before deploying any democratic technology, ask:
Does this help a person make their own decision freely, privately and without unnecessary fear?
If the answer is no, keep listening and improve the system.
If the answer is uncertain, test it with the people most likely to be affected.
If somebody identifies a problem, do not dismiss them simply because the problem was invisible from another perspective.
Listen.
Learn.
Communicate.
Adapt.
Find the concord.
Then act.
Democracy is not simply the mechanism used to count votes.
It is the creation of conditions in which people are genuinely free to decide what those votes should be.
Listen first.
Understand as much as possible.
Learn from every perspective.
Build agreement where agreement is possible.
Reach concord.
Then turn that understanding into action.