We suspect this will be one of many ‘tw-opinion’ polls that use twitter to predict how the nation is feeling about the election, how people plan to vote and ultimately the outcome. 

Twitelection invites users not just to name a party but to use  happy or sad face to express sentiment or emotion in relation to the main parties. It also needs the hashtag #ukvote and of course the name of the party.  There is an option to include postcode information that could be used in conjunction with constituency mapping to predict the outcome in marginal constituencies.

Over time it shows how the twelectorate (Ok that’s enough….ed) are feeling about the parties rather than simply how they will vote. 

At present there aren’t quite the volume of tweets out there to make this a meaningful assessment of real changes attitude to the party but it is early days and as the campaign and the tweets ramp up it could become part of our daily election stat diet.

In an article in The Times today Alastair Campbell claims that the social web has altered the power balance in political campaigning. “The internet and, in particular, social networking have changed the terms of the relationship between the parties, the media and the public, taking at least some of the power to influence away from parties and media, to the benefit of the public”.

The former journalist and spin doctor supreme has himself embraced the social web and so may be well placed to judge.  He is a regular blogger and his twitter account @campbellclaret (claret here is a reference to his beloved Burnley football team rather than Burgundy wine – Campbell is teetotal) has over 15 thousand followers.  Political blogger Iain Dale names Campbell as the number 2 Labour twitterer after the Prime Minister’s wife. 

Compared with the US presidential election of 2008 the level of engagement via the social web has been low in the run up to the 2010 UK general election but there are many politicians experimenting with on-line dialogue.   There are now signs that all of the major parties are stepping up their on-line activity.  It could be that the phony war is over and Alastair Campbell, so influential in previous elections, has just fired the starting gun on the social media election battle.

Brown has fuelled the debate on electoral reform by proposing the Aussie style alternative vote (AV) system for parliamentary elections.  If it happens this may be the last time we put a cross on a ballot paper as the AV system is a preference vote that requires numbers in the boxes.  But should we be using those dreadful little pencils at all.  Isn’t it about time that we started to look at electronic voting from our PCs or smartphones?  If we can safeguard bank transactions surely we have the wit to make online voting secure. 

Cost cutting measures will see many of the official counts not even starting until the morning after the election (it is cheaper to pay counters for day time work).  In the event of a hung parliament there is a real danger that the election won’t be decided until all of theses votes are in.   Though there is little doubt that the media and the exit polls will have an accurate prediction minutes after the booths close. 

Why aren’t the major parties talking about electronic voting?  Is it perhaps because it is a short step from electronic voting every five years to regular referenda on line and a more direct style of democracy?  No that really would piss on the collective chips of our elected representatives.