How Online Voting Can Play a Role in Making Elections More Sustainable

Digitalization, green energy, eco-friendliness, hi-tech - we encounter many buzzwords like these daily, but how much do we actually think about how our lives and these words intersect? As we demonstrate below, online voting can potentially, in more ways than one, serve as a part of the larger global effort to cut down on emissions and live in balance with nature.

Reducing Resource Use

When we talk about “sustainability,” our discussion largely centers around the environment and natural resources, along with how and how much we use them. It’s no secret that traditional elections have several aspects - ballots, advertisements, flyers, pamphlets, trinkets handed out by political parties and candidates - which require a fair amount of resources to create.?

As we’ll touch upon later, electronics also require resources to run, but one study from 2009 found that carbon dioxide emissions in a board election with 40,000 voters dropped by 98% when voting took place online instead of with paper ballots. That’s certainly not chump change, and, with improvements in efficiency since then, we can only expect resource use to be even lower now.

Cutting Down on the Need for Transportation

We can’t say enough about the potential for online voting when it comes to those who have difficulty accessing physical polling stations, including voters with disabilities, soldiers, and those living overseas. But there is another factor we need to consider when people need to vote in-person: transportation.

On average, an automobile emits 0.25 kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilometer traveled. That may not seem like much, but should you have a longer commute to your workplace or polling place like some in the United States, you could easily be giving off upwards of 16 kg of carbon dioxide just to cast a ballot. This doesn’t even include the impact of making ballots and promotional materials!

By contrast, video streaming, the internet activity with the highest emissions, will only emit at most 1 kg of carbon dioxide per hour. As such, even during a live conference-type voting event, your emissions will always be lower than if you had to commute by car to vote. One fewer vehicle on the road, one more ballot in the box (and less carbon dioxide in the air).?

Spearheading a Larger “Green Transition”

In an environmental context, what does “transition” exactly mean? Aside from digitizing processes, which shows enormous promise for “green” projects, any conversation about a “green transition” inevitably circles back to two important matters: reducing consumption and transforming the energy grid to use more renewable energy.

We certainly believe that online voting is already making a significant impact in helping lower our resource uses, but this is only the start of the conversation. We must also make sure that, as more voters come online, the electricity powering our devices comes more from green sources in order to not raise emissions.

It is also important to note that having more efficient elections via systems such as ranked-choice voting and single transferable vote also help reduce resource use by finding winners in a single round of voting. As online voting systems can be set up easily for these elections, we are excited about how much of a “game-changer” it might be.

Hungering for the full story? Hop on over to our company blog to get filled in on all the details surrounding online voting and sustainability.?

Written by Alexander Boylston, writer at Assembly Voting