Most first time voters won’t.  No great surprise in that, or in the fact that the 31% who say they will vote is a smaller proportion than the equivalent last time round.

What is intriguing is that if online voting were available, 58% say they would vote, and if text voting were possible, 60% would vote.

There are some obvious difficulties with those numbers:

  • it’s easy to say you would vote online, safe in the knowledge that you can’t
  • the reasons given for not voting aren’t straightforwardly addressed by introducing a new channel.
  • first-time voters – by definition between 18 and 22 – are hardly representative.

But the figures are pretty stark.  And of course the more we are interested in ways people might behave in five or ten years from now, the more relevant these kinds of numbers are.  Interesting implications for us – and for what we should perhaps start thinking as our legacy delivery models.

Figures come from an ICM poll for the BBC.