Gerrymandering online

I have elsewhere on this blog - even in the last week - expressed some cynicism about the government's interest in obtaining the views of its citizens, via the Internet or by any other means, and so its fundamental interest in promoting online forms of participation.

I wasn't exactly surprised when last year the bulk of individual e-mail addresses disappeared from the Office of the e-Envoy's website. Today I just looked at Danny O'Brien's blog, only to find that he has had to write a letter to Beverley Hughes, complaining that ALL the full submissions to the consultation process about the Entitlement Card routed via the STAND campaign (the only one that received any publicity and that didn't involve the download of a bandwidth-squeezing monster file) were treated as a SINGLE submission.

This strikes me as some kind of online equivalent of gerrymandering. I spent a good hour drafting my text, and I know many, many others did likewise. But our submissions simply do not count at all, as all the 5,029 full submissions via the STAND website count as only one submission, and the 2,000 submissions made via the 'official' channel count as 2,000, allowing Ms Hughes to declare that the majority of submissions were in favour. And then they complain that people are losing interest in parliamentary politics....

Danny's letter to Ms Hughes can be read in full on Oblomovka.
The BBC reported the story last Friday.