Treating Voters as an Afterthought? The Legacies of a Decade of Electoral Modernisation in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Over the past decade, the UK's New Labour government has been at the forefront of efforts internationally to modernise electoral procedures, promising to deliver ‘an e‐enabled, multi‐channel general election by 2006’. This paper considers the origins and the impacts of reforms to UK electoral procedures with a particular focus on the adoption of postal voting on demand and pilots of electronic voting and counting since 2000. The paper concludes that the principal legacy of the modernisation agenda to date is likely to have been a negative impact on public confidence in the electoral process.