Digital democracy
(or "e-democracy")
Since the advent of the internet, people have been sharing their views of the world and communicating with each other online almost without limitations.
MiVote commissioned Roy Morgan Research to conduct an online representative poll of 1,170 Australians in February 2017.
It asked:
“How likely would you be to use an online platform to vote on policy issues affecting Australia, if it was available?”
The results of the poll were:
This poll shows a vast majority of Australians would be open to using a platform like NewVote to vote on policy issues.
Generally speaking, the use of technology to vote in politics to date has taken either one of two forms:
as an augmentation of the current voting system; or
as a new platform to challenge the current political system.
Augmentation
This refers to a service that makes no substantial change to the existing political system, rather, it augments the current system to allow online votes. An example of this is “ivote”a company based in New South Wales. Supported by the NSW Electoral Commission, the purpose of this service is to assist people who live a certain distance from voting booths to cast their vote online.
Another example is the nation of Estonia, the world leader in online voting, which allows voters to cast their ballot online rather than in person.
NewVote does not aim to merely augment the existing political system with online voting.
New platforms
There are many new platforms with an element of digital democracy that exist online today - we fall into this category as we are a nonpartisan nonprofit proponent of direct, deliberative and delegative democratic principles that is independent of government.