Case:EVote for the EU you want (description)
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This case is an example from the EU Goodpractice Framework.
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Abstract
e-Vote is a initiative of the Greek Presidency of the European Union to enhance and expand eDemocracy across the EU. This innovative online voting project aims to use the latest technology to give citizens new ways to participate in ongoing debates and decisions about the key issues facing the Union today, as it prepares to undertake the biggest enlargement in its history.
By visiting the e-Vote website any citizen can vote on the important issues that affect their everyday lives, share and compare their ideas and opinions with other Europeans in real time, and make specific suggestions about the current and future EU.
The project comprises six questionnaires, or "e-Votes", on specific themes: The EU Today, The EU's Role in the World, The Future of the EU, The Lisbon Agenda and Beyond, Immigration and Asylum and Sustainable Development. Additionally, there will be special votes on breaking news and topical issues relating to the agenda of the Greek Presidency, such as the Iraq crisis and drug policy. As of 9th April, 2003, 141.000 citizens have already participated in e-Vote. e-Vote is available in all 11 official languages of the EU, and as of April 16th in all the languages of the future member states as well.
Most importantly, the responses from citizens are incorporated into the daily activities of the Greek Presidency. George A. Papandreou, Greek Foreign Minister and EU President in office, will regularly share the results of e-Vote with his colleagues in the Council of Ministers, the Commission, and the European Parliament. The e-Vote results will also feed directly into the debate to be had by Heads of State and Government at the European Council in Thessaloniki on 21st and 22nd June.
Description
Backgroud
The Greek Presidency's e-Vote project is based on the experience of a similar project, the Online Global Poll on Sustainable Development and the Environment, conducted by the Andreas Papandreou Foundation for the United Nations World Summit in Johannesburg in September 2002.
One of the criticisms of the UN World Summit was that those most affected by the policies and decisions being made at the Summit, whether farmers in Costa Rica, schoolchildren in Tanzania, or Inuits in the Arctic - were not adequately represented. The idea for the Online Global Poll arose from the need to include these people in the critical debate about the future of our planet. While the digital divide is of course a real concern that needs to be addressed, the power of the Internet and eDemocracy is the capacity to overcome this distance from decision-making bodies and to harness the positive aspects of globalisation. This new technology allows people to mobilise around common causes, build transnational networks across regions, religions, and races, thus strengthening civil society, an essential pre-requisite of any democratic governance.
Over 25,000 people in 175 countries participated in the Online Global Poll over a one month period. (For more information on this project, please visit the netpulse global poll.) The remarkable levels of participation and positive responses from the Online Global Poll encouraged the Greek Foreign Ministry to create a similar forum for civil expression and political participation as part of the Greek EU Presidency. The objective was to provide a wide-ranging set of thought-provoking questions on critical and topical issues in the most accessible way possible, as well as giving participants the opportunity to track results in real time, and to submit suggestions and questions directly to EU leaders. In this way, e-Vote is an important step towards bridging the gap between European leaders and their constituents, European institutions and ordinary citizens, but also between nations and regions.
Objectives
The main objective of the e-Vote initiative is to enrich and reinvigorate democratic dialogue across Europe, both amongst ordinary citizens and between people and their leaders. One of the key considerations behind this experiment is the Greek Presidency's commitment to reduce the democratic deficit of the European Union and to ensure that its institutions respond to European citizen's real concerns and needs. e-Vote actively solicits public views in a way that makes the deliberations in the European Union more inclusive, accountable, transparent and, ultimately, more democratic. This exercise is particularly relevant in light of the upcoming enlargement and the necessary far-reaching reforms that will accompany it, as reflected in the deliberations currently taking place in the Convention on the Future of Europe.
Enlargement is a bold undertaking that calls for an equally radical overhaul of our democratic processes, in order to create a new framework of European governance equal to the wide-ranging needs and demands of its constituents. As the Union expands to include ten new members, comprising some 450 million citizens, we need to find new ways to ensure that citizens across the continent can identify with and partake in European politics. e-Vote is unique in that it is not simply a passive expression of public opinion, but has created a new European forum for people to express their views directly to their leaders. Gauging the views of citizens across Europe on a range of key issues that will affect their collective future, and giving Europeans the chance to share and compare their opinions with their fellow Europeans, will hopefully encourage a greater sense of European citizenship. In turn, this will ensure that European citizens feel both better represented and more inter-connected in EU institutions.
Besides the goal of re-engaging people in politics, e-Vote is designed to assure them that their voice will be heard and their views included in the decision-making process. Through e-vote, for the first time ever, ordinary people's views feed directly into top-level political discussions in the EU. George A. Papandreou, Greek Foreign Minister and EU President in office, has committed to regularly share the results of e-Vote with his colleagues in the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, and the European Commission, throughout the duration of the Greek Presidency. Indeed, Mr. Papandreou has already shared the results of some of the e-Votes on several occasions with the Foreign Ministers of all 15 EU Member States in the Council of Ministers, and will continue to do so.
By raising awareness of important topical issues and encouraging greater participation in the political process, the Greek Presidency aims at achieving as high a number of participants as possible. As such, we hope that e-Vote will be the most popular exercise in e-democracy ever conducted in the European Union.
Output and results
Since the e-Vote initiative is an ongoing project, lasting until the end of the Greek EU Presidency (30 June 2003), no final results can yet be presented. However, the main objectives of the project have already been attained: a remarkably extensive participation of citizens across Europe in the various e-Votes and the sharing of the results at the highest political level in the EU.
Attached as an annex you will also find a selection of the bi-weekly e-Vote Reports published on the e-Vote website, highlighting the latest facts and figures on specific issues. Also attached are the latest statistics on the numbers of participants from various countries as well as the current (8 April 2003) results of each individual e-vote. Already, a total of over 140,000 people have participated in e-Vote, with over 106,000 taking part in the most popular vote on the Iraq crisis. These figures demonstrate the extremely high interest among European citizens in using this type of eDemocracy initiative to express their views and engage in the political process.
The feedback we have received from both e-voters themselves and the media has been overwhelmingly positive, with many comments highlighting the innovative features of e-Vote, such as the possibility to compare your results with those of other voters and the fact that the results have actually been discussed and shared at the highest possible political level in the EU.
e-Vote has also attracted extensive media coverage in a number of difference countries (see the In the News section of the website for a selection of articles: [1], as well as a number of high profile Media Partnerships.
The outreach to civil society has proved successful in that numerous organisations, associations, NGOs, schools and universities have widely circulated eMails to their members, employees and other networks urging people to e-vote. This success has been documented through the significant increases in voting levels after email communications sent out to these groups.
All the key EU institutions (including the Commission and Parliament) have endorsed e-Vote and have included the e-Vote logo and link on their home pages, as well as circulating eMails amongst staff to encourage them to participate.
Lessons and conclusions
Since the e-Vote initiative has been a bold, new experiment in eDemocracy at the European level, the process has proven to be an invaluable learning exercise for all those involved. Although other EU initiatives, such as the European Commission's Your Voice in Europe [europa.eu.int/yourvoice/index_en.htm] website, offer some possibilities for citizens to participate in policy debates and to voice their opinions, this is the first time that such a broad consultation of European citizens through the Internet has been organised by a public administration at the EU level.
The high rates of participation in e-Vote, compared to similar exercises both in Europe and beyond, demonstrates very clearly that there is a significant demand among European citizens to use the Internet as a medium for expressing their opinions and concerns to European leaders. Extensive feedback from the public and media suggests that one of the main reasons e-Vote has been such a success is the Greek Presidency's commitment to share the results of the e-votes with top-level decision makers in the Council, Commission and Parliament, thus ensuring citizen's voices are heard. Far from being lost in cyber-space, the opinions of interested citizens have a real impact on EU policy-making.
In addition, the Presidency has not shied away from asking potentially controversial and even politically sensitive questions, which are not usually voiced through other more traditional channels of communication with government bodies and official institutions.
An analysis of the current results of e-Vote shows that the more topical and "hot" the issue at stake, the more people are interested in voicing their opinion. The most popular vote by far has been the one on the Iraq crisis, with over 106,000 voters as of 8 April. This demonstrates the value of e-Vote as a flexible and up-to-date tool for eDemocracy: new questionnaires can be added and old ones removed or archived as issues arise on the agenda of decision-makers and public opinion in Europe.
Naturally the question of whether e-Vote is a perfect reflection of public opinion on these topics was raised and the simple answer is that of course it is not. e-Vote was never intended to be a scientific public opinion poll. e-Vote is about increasing public participation and reducing the democratic deficit, giving people a way to participate in the decision-making process and making these decisions more transparent, accessible, and inclusive. When people vote in a regular political election or referendum, it is not a scientific measure of public opinion, but a measure of those who chose to participate. It is the same with e-Vote. This is an experiment, the first experiment of its type in using the Internet as a tool to communicate the views of European citizens to European leaders.
Taking into account the uneven access to the Internet across the EU, the high number and wide-ranging geographical scope of participants attests to both the usefulness and necessity of such a channel to allow people to voice their concerns and opinions on current EU policies and future challenges. Given the digital divide, any Internet-based voting might be criticised as being unrepresentative of broader public opinion. But this type of initiative highlights the importance of tackling the digital divide, both through existing and enhanced EU policy directives. While many Europeans still do not have access to the Internet, it is growing faster than any other means of communication: more people used the Internet in its first five years than in the first thirty years of the telephone. In time, the Internet will become a vital part of the democratic process and e-Vote is an important first step. If necessary, special online voting booths could be set up across theEU to ensure that those without access to technology and those in rural or peripheral areas are included in future projects of this nature.
Looking at the lessons learned and points to be taken into consideration for similar exercises in the future, in order for the results to be both interesting, valid, and worth taking into account in the policy-making process, the key issue is to reach out to a maximum number of participants. It is easy for politicians to overlook the voices of only 2000-3000 citizens (the number of voters who have taken the e-vote on Effective Drug Policy for the EU) as being representative of public opinion, although many important trends and ideas can be retrieved even from a lower number of voters. On the other hand, it is much more difficult for politicians to ignore the opinions that over 106,000 Europeans have expressed on the Iraq crisis and the role that the EU should play in it.
Responses from participants express strong support for making this kind of online voting a permanent feature of policy-making in the EU. According to the responses from the e-Voters, 71.48% of males and 68.91% of all voters like the idea, and they would frequently register their opinions on important issues. In order to increase participation in all European countries, it is therefore critical to raise awareness of such online voting initiatives through public information, advertising, marketing and other communications campaigns, as well as providing free voting points in public places if possible, e.g. in schools, universities, stations, libraries, etc. It is equally important to reassure participants that their votes are treated confidentially and that the results of the vote will have a real, visible impact.
Related case study analyses
Case analysis: Case:EVote_for_the_EU_you_want
