In a speech to the National Council of Voluntary Organisations this morning, Gordon Brown announced he would be convening a Speaker’s conference on voting reform:

Today I am proposing to the Speaker that he calls a conference to consider, against the backdrop of a decline in turnout, a number of important issues, such as electoral registration, weekend voting, and the representation of women and ethnic minorities in the House of Commons.

The Speakers Conference could also examine, in parallel with the Youth Citizenship Commission, whether we should lower the voting age to 16, so that we build upon citizenship education in schools and combine the right to vote with the legal recognition of when young adults become citizens.

Notice that remote electronic voting is absent from the (albeit non-exhaustive) list of potential topics for discussion. This is unusual, as increases in voter turnout is the most often-supplied reason for introducing e-voting into the UK electoral system (even though evidence to support this assumption is rarely forthcoming).

The Governance of Britain green paper produced by the Ministry of Justice before Parliament’s Summer recess mentions remote electronic voting specifically (see para 150). Are the Electoral Commission’s recent recommendations (not to mention the observations of ORG’s volunteer electoral monitoring team) persuading Government to reconsider?

Is e-voting off the agenda?