Or even better, once a resident has signed up to pay council tax (or whatever service reserved for residents), they get a secure online account that can be used for voting on local matters.
I don’t want trees to be sacrificed every time the council needs to ask the public a question.
The only problem is that anything ‘online’ still excludes a lot of people. You could solve that by asking people to ‘opt in’ to online communication similar to banks’ ‘go paperless’ to save trees aka costs. Much more efficient and green, but the problem then becomes what happens when people move out of the area - their email address doesn’t change. Thats why I think they need to still mail a code to your door until they figure out how to solve it.
The question still remains as to whether it’s effective to consult people on every issue and will they get voter fatigue. Local turnout is already low - do you think giving people a vote on everything would promote interest in local issues? How do you decide what gets voted on? It gets complicated very easily.
I don’t think this has ever been suggested and is just a strawman for the actual issue of some specific sweeping changes being enacted under the guise of an emergency response to Covid-19 i.e. the LTNs and road closures.
Even with consultation there will be ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in most schemes, but at least the voices get to be heard and things potentially adjusted before changes are made that divide communities and effect lots of people’s quality of life, for the better or worse.
I guess a big bonus of any sort of digital polling is that it can be done quickly and cheaply once infrastructure is in place. But getting the security right is very difficult. We only have to look at eVoting in the US to see the problems there.
That fact didn’t stop the council from using the Commonplace online portal though, did it?
That’s correct, hence we’re having a discussion about how to reliably poll residents.
This is why I suggested using the online account which is used for council tax administration. That already has a system for deregistering when a resident moves out.
That’s a great idea then.
I agree with you. But I don’t think anyone ever suggested consulting people on every issue, did they?
And voting would, of course, be optional.
You use the strawman defence often. So let me rephrase my question.
How/who decides what issues the council should petition people on.
How do you ensure that people don’t get voter fatigue if asked to vote on too many issues?
I think it’s an interesting question in general. I would be interested to hear if there are any good solutions. Personally I’d love to vote on more local issues. I don’t have a party line and so I prefer to consider topics on their individual merits.
It’s not a defense, just a note that you are moving the discussion to a different argument, as you are doing here again 
In the general case I think it should be pretty clear if policy or action is being taken which either has a high level of public interest, or is not covered by previous election manifesto’s or beyond the normal remit of elected officials. Effective consultation (which is not the same as polling everyone) should be performed in these cases to make sure affected groups get fair consideration and their point of view and concerns are not over looked. Better engagement with the public could also result in more support for the final result, as well as less teething problems or outright mistakes.
However, running effective consultation is not easy and may take time, requiring different approaches in parallel to reach all groups. Hence this topic I guess.
I suggested it in response to your topic question. I didn’t suggest anyone else suggested it.
I asked it in the context of how do you decide which issues to petition people on. Clearly it’s not practical to poll on every single topic, so I was postulating this with regards to where do you draw the line on what to petition on, or even what to consult on. I think that is the tricky part, aside from the logistics.
In principle I agree this makes sense, but how do you define what is ‘pretty clear’ or has a ‘high level of public interest’ where everyone has different interests. How do you stop people petitioning to have their issues consulted on?