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I place electronic voting alongside telephone voting, and postal voting; all can be abused to encourage a particular outcome which is untrue.

The only true method of democratic voting is by the pen and paper and the ballot box.

Telephone voting can be switched to another person, or prevent an area even gaining access to the vote, and then there is no proof you actually got through to where you wanted to go.

Postal voting means voting BEFORE the campaigning period is finished. Fine if you know the campaign hustings won't make any difference to your vote, but postal votes are not registered in the same way as ballot votes and bags of postal votes can be mislaid, or read before the finish time of polling arrives.

Electronic voting is another form of voting that does not ensure a fair and honest ballot. Computer systems are known to succumb to viruses; they can be switched at any stage in the large transfer system so fraud can happen at any time by those outside the system. Computer programmes can be set up so that they alter votes, discard votes, ignore votes, etc. What proof does the electorate have that the vote has gone where it is supposed to go?

I ask this not just because there have been many instances where trials of electronic voting has failed to produce the correct answer, but because I don't trust our politicians to allow a fair and honest election. They are more interested in their own political life than the lives of the people who elect them.

At one time we had a good, relatively safe, method of democratic voting: everyone knew how many ballot boxes there should be, they were locked until the time when the count should begin, and the votes were kept secret. Then, people who were corrupt tried to change things so the vote would go in their favour: they weren't prepared to abide by the proper democratic decision. Things began to slowly unravel, and democratic voting became a twisted game in which the voter was the loser.

Electronic voting allows so many mistakes, twists, corrupt decisions, to be made that I would never trust a decision based on electronic voting.

No-one can be sure that corruption within the electronic voting procedure will not happen. It really is the stuff of democratic nightmares!

Learn more about this author, Carol Noble.
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