The writer is author of the forthcoming book ‘The Majority Myth — How Voting Really Works’
It is one of the oddities of public life in western democracies that, despite decades of digital transformation, the way we vote remains fundamentally untouched. Technology has been added but unimaginatively: electronic voting machines and online ballots simply facilitate the same system. The ballot box is treated as if it were a sacred relic, yet our voting customs are not so old.
The secret ballot was introduced in the UK in 1872 to prevent landlords from intimidating tenants — as with other voting rules, it was a practical fix, not a constitutional ideal. The problems have changed and technology now affords opportunities for voting that the architects of our election systems could never have imagined.