Sometimes I almost feel sorry for the government. Almost. The fact that the electoral turnout has been dropping to record levels in the last few years is worrying many people. How can our elected officials really claim to have a mandate for power if they have only been voted-in by a small percentage of another small percentage? More people probably vote for Big Brother or the latest Celebrity find-the-new-lead-in-a-West-End-musical programme to shame our screens, than for our politicians. Maybe they could combine the two and have Simon Cowell hold an election night stand-off between Cameron and Brown?

That is of course one of the reasons why e-voting has been trumpeted as the saviour of democracy – give them a system so easy they don’t even have to leave the house to do it. Problem is it really isn’t good enough yet, as US precedent has shown. But as usual the government took has taken no notice and tried it anyway, in 17 local authorities to be precise. And guess what…electoral turnout jumped by a massive 4 percent. Could it be that the public is also unconvinced about the accuracy of the technology?

Brian Chess, chief scientist of Fortify Software has gone on record as saying, “As with any computerised system, e-voting machines can be subject to programming errors and malicious tampering. With evidence in the States clearly showing that the voting machine certification process is flawed, how can any citizen be expected to trust this new system?”. And he’s right. The problem is, though, that the vast majority of the public probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote anyway. And as was seen in Scotland, even the old cross-in-the-box malarkey can prove to be a little too taxing for some: there were over 100,000 spoilt ballots north of the border.