Elections

Government to trial voting by Facebook and Snapchat at next general election

Downing Street says the scheme will widen access and cut the cost of running an election. Security researchers say the plan abandons the secret ballot.

LONDON — Voters would be able to cast a ballot through Facebook or Snapchat at the next general election under plans announced by Downing Street on Wednesday, in what the prime minister called the start of "a new era of democracy" and what election-security specialists described within hours as unworkable.

The announcement, issued as a written statement from the Prime Minister's Office, sets out the two platforms as trial voting channels running alongside polling stations and postal votes. The government says the scheme would help people who struggle to reach a polling station and would cut the administrative cost of an election, with the savings redirected into public services.

"Social media voting is about making it easier for every eligible citizen to have a say in our country's future," the prime minister, Helen Marsh, said in the statement. "It's about inclusivity, accessibility, and saving taxpayer money."

The statement runs to under 400 words and contains no costings, no timetable and no description of how a vote would be verified, stored or counted. Its single security commitment is that the method is "underpinned by the widespread adoption of two-factor authentication on social media platforms".

That sentence drew most of the criticism. Two-factor authentication confirms that the person logging in controls the account; it says nothing about what happens to a vote afterwards, or about who can see it.

You are not protecting a ballot, you are protecting a login. Everything that makes an election trustworthy happens after that point, and none of it is addressed here.

Dr Priya Nandakumar, Centre for Election Integrity

The sharpest objection is to secrecy rather than to fraud. British elections are built on the principle that no one — not an employer, not a spouse, not the state, and not a company — can find out how any individual voted. A social media account is the opposite arrangement: it is a persistent, named identity, held on servers owned by a private firm, already linked to a phone number, a device and a location.

"A secret ballot is not a feature you can add to a platform whose entire business is knowing who its users are," Nandakumar said. "And once voting happens on a phone, in a kitchen, in front of whoever else is in the room, you have also lost the polling booth — which is the thing that stops people being pressured into voting a particular way."

Digital inclusion campaigners raised a second objection. Several million adults in the UK use the internet rarely or not at all, a group weighted towards older people, disabled people and low-income households — some of the same voters the government says the scheme is designed to help.

"Announcing a channel that skews young and calling it inclusion is the wrong way round," said Marian Okafor of the charity Access to Voting. "If the concern is people who find it hard to get to a polling station, there are answers that already exist and already work."

The elections regulator said it had not been consulted before the statement was issued and that it would seek an urgent meeting with officials. A spokesperson said any change to voting methods would need to be tested well in advance of a poll, not announced alongside one.

Opposition MPs called the plan a distraction. The shadow minister for the constitution said the government had "put out a press release about an app and called it a democratic reform", and asked whether the Cabinet Office had produced any security assessment at all.

Downing Street did not answer questions on Wednesday afternoon about which department would run the trial. The statement itself carries the Prime Minister's Office address, but directs press enquiries to the Home Office — which has no responsibility for the conduct of elections.

Asked whether a trial could be in place before the next general election, a government spokesperson said only that work was "at an early stage".