Let’s do e-voting

The voting is over and the winner is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. However, the aftermath of the voting is still chaotic. Every party that participated in the elections is busy trying to figure out what the results mean for their future and how they should proceed into the future. The reason why there is so much debate is the huge number of people who did not vote. Erdoğan received 19,878,000 votes, whereas Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu got 14,800,000. The non-voters totaled 17,800,000 people. It is a lot more than what Ekmeleddin received and was very close to the winner. If they voted, the results could have been different. That is the main point of all of the debates. If the 17,800,000 voted, would they vote for İhsanoğlu or for Erdoğan or they would be distributed according to the current percentages and nothing would change?

The future of the Turkish political scene could shape according to the convictions of the political leaders about the possible distribution of the non-voters’ votes. If Erdoğan thinks that if the non-voters voted, they would have voted for him, then he could be an even harsher leader than he already is. If he thinks that if the non-voters had voted, they would have voted for the opposition, then he may give up the idea of becoming Turkey’s first acting president.

So the real question becomes something else about these 17,800,000 non-voters. Did they not vote because they were on holiday or was it a political act declaring none of the candidates fit for their idea of president?

Finding out about this is very, very crucial for the future of all of the democracies around the world.  The number of non-voters is even higher in the western world than Turkey.

That is where technology comes in. We should make it very, very, very easy to vote from anywhere around the world so that we should be almost certain about the non-voters’ intentions. It is much easier than our current form of voting. All we need is an application that runs on any digital device. The MERNIS identity number of each Turkish citizen is unique; therefore, in theory a simple voting application that uses our ID numbers is enough. If there was such an application, there could be an “I don’t want to vote,” button and a little survey for the non-voters so that we really understand their intentions.

Maybe non-voters are telling us something that as the society we don’t want to hear. Maybe they are telling all the political parties to change and we do not realize it.