Has the e-election finally arrived?

The campaigning is underway - even online

Forget your doubts, this time we are going to have an e-election, argues technology analyst Bill Thompson.

The general election is upon us, and net watchers are already trying to decide whether it will be hailed as the UK's first internet election or if we will see the political parties fumble their online campaigns yet again.

It is usual to hedge one's bets this early in the running, arguing that it is too soon to tell and claiming that the signs point a little one way and a little the other.

That way a seasoned pundit can claim to be right on 5 May, whatever actually happens.

So I would like to break with tradition and call this one for the internet. Wherever we look it is clear that internet tools like e-mail, websites and chat are going to be central to the election.

It will happen at every level and goes far beyond the national campaigns run by the major parties. It happened in the US last year, and it's going to happen over here in the next four weeks.

On 6 May it will be interesting to look at voting patterns and see if it is possible to determine how much impact this had BBC News Election 2005 BBC News election blog

One reason for believing this is that the big parties have unquestionably finally "got it", and are going to make very effective use of e-mail and the web.

Back in February I was rather sceptical, but since then the parties have demonstrated that they know what they are doing.

Labour showed it first, even before the campaign proper, when it e-mailed early versions of its election posters to members and generated vast amounts of publicity from a carefully choreographed furore by putting Michael Howard's head on a flying pig.

A recent e-mail to party members ends with the line "reproduced from an e-mail sent by the Labour Party", which puzzled me until I realised they were thinking about what would happen if it was printed out and circulated and the need to follow election rules.

Both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives are showing the same sort of awareness, and we can expect to see some effective online activity from them and the other national parties.

The net has become more relevant since the last election

Of course it is not only the national parties that plan to make the net an important campaign tool: those who will be directly affected by the outcome are taking to the net themselves.

Jamie McCoy, who used to be homeless, has set up a weblog called Jamie's Big Voice to provide a space for homeless people to engage with politicians - and vice versa.

His will be one of thousands of personal sites, dealing with issues at all level from the global to the incredibly local.

The Hansard Society is even doing what it can to engage young people under the voting age, with a forum on the election on its HeadsUp site, where young people can talk about what the parties offer them.

And Channel 4 has commissioned a UK version of the US Factcheck website, looking at claims made by politicians and pointing out errors or unwarranted assertions.

Last year Will Davies, one of the UK's most important thinkers on the social and societal impact of new technology, coined the phrase 'proxicommunication' to describe what happens when e-mail, chat and the web are used to promote local communications and local action.

And while this is a national election, it is the individual decisions made by voters in each constituency that really matter.

Away from the national messages and the poster campaigns, the net provides a way for local issues to make a real difference, encouraging support for a candidate here, undermining a party's message there, and bringing local issues to the fore in way that remains outside the control of the major parties.

When the dust has settled on 6 May it will be interesting to look at voting patterns and see if it is possible to determine how much impact this had.

E-mails and web sites are part of the election process

I think it will be significant enough to give the national campaigns reason to question their spending on things like billboards or national party political broadcasts.

There is, of course, a big difference between the campaign and the vote. I am completely opposed to online voting, and pretty dubious about whether electronic voting from polling stations can be made secure either.

The recent verdict on the postal voting fraud in last year's Birmingham council elections has only reinforced my view that paper ballots completed in a polling station and counted by hand are the best defence for democracy, because the many inefficiencies in the system make it incredibly hard to rig the vote.

But online campaigning is different. It is the equivalent of doing your comparison shopping on the net and then going to your local department store to get the digital camera you have chosen without having to pay postage and wait in for a delivery that never arrives when it's supposed to.

This week BT announced that it had more than five million broadband customers, an amazing achievement and a good sign that broadband has managed to make the shift from being a technology for early adopters and into the mainstream.

Those broadband users are going to want to put their network connections to work, and for the next four weeks it is likely that a lot of them will be visiting party websites, checking out candidate profiles, discovering local issues and figuring out which way to vote.

Even the ones who canot bring themselves to vote for any of the candidates have got some help online. At www.notapathetic.com you can explain why you are not voting, instead of letting people assume you just do not care.

As with so much else of the online activity around the election, the site does something that would be difficult or not impossible without the net, and does it in a way that enhances the democratic process and opens up the campaign.

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Bill Thompson is a regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Go Digital.