LONDON, England (CNN) -- Asked recently whether Britons may one day soon elect their leaders over the Internet, the minister was terse.

"Britain is not ready for a Net election," said Mo Mowlam, a plain-speaking politician whose job as head of Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet office involves finding ways to galvanise her boss's modernisation drive.

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Mowlam's assertion, at a panel discussion about Internet elections in late March, may seem at odds with Blair's nearly three-year-old pledge to make Britain "the best place in the world to trade electronically by 2002."

In fact, it reflects a creeping suspicion in some parts of Europe that the Web, while well suited to commerce and information gathering, should be handled with greater care where the mechanics of electoral democracy are concerned.

As Britain and Italy head into national elections, the Internet -- though growing -- is still a relatively minor factor in both countries' electoral calculus.

For all the lip service politicians such as Blair pay to the Net imperative, the reality, observers say, is that most Western politicians are yet to embrace the notion of "e-electioneering" with any real conviction.

Where Internet voting has been tried, though, the feedback has been generally positive.

In the first such legally binding foray into online elections, tens of thousands of Arizona voters logged on to their computers to vote in the state's Democratic primaries in March 2000.

The same month, France staged its first Internet vote: an online ballot held during a global conference on "e-Democracy" to elect a municipal council of Internet users in the town of Issy-Les-Moulineaux.

And last September, also in France, the voting service company Election.com helped organise a Web referendum in the town of Brest on the question of reducing the presidential term from seven to five years.

Meanwhile, the Baltic nation of Estonia (population 1.4 million) could become the first European country to allow Web voting in a national election, if legislators give the green light to a proposal by the country's Justice Minister to introduce e-voting in parliamentary elections set for 2003.

But the proposal faces a number of hurdles, notably concerns about the high cost of conducting and auditing such a vote, and preventing double-voting or other abuses.

Casting wider political Net

Regis Jamin, vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Election.com, believes Internet voting in France would help minimise fraud and bring greater uniformity to a somewhat disjointed nationwide voting system.

At present, Jamin says, most of France's 35,000 communes use different voting systems, creating a potential for confusion.

Jamin also sees the Internet as a valuable tool for enhancing contact between politicians and constituents, and for reaching far more people than through the traditional approach of door-to-door campaigning.

"You have to be able to reach people directly," Jamin said, adding there are few mediums more effective than the Internet for doing that on a global scale. Many people, he said, see online voting as a way of "relaunching" participatory democracy.

Jamin cites a recent survey by the University of California in Los Angeles showing that the much-touted "digital divide" between those who have Internet access and those who don't is likely to disappear within five years.

There are already signs that attitudes are evolving. Take Vaclav Klaus, a former Czech prime minister who provoked an outcry among Web gurus when he questioned the utility of the Internet in a national newspaper article in 1997.

In the article, Klaus, now the leader of the opposition in parliament, asserted that the information revolution unleashed by the Internet threatened to "fragment our society and lessen our social capital."

"Our post-modern society seems to be interested in new, unusual, marginal, untested ideas which unbalance us and destroy our peace of mind," Klaus wrote. He added: "We need firmly anchored behaviour and firmly anchored attitudes. The Internet will hardly help in this."

Today Klaus has a Web site, which he regularly updates in both Czech and English.

Taking the guts out of politics?

Mowlam describes the Internet as an "important adjunct" in the political process.

But she has her doubts as well, evincing concern that over-reliance on the Web could "take the guts out of politics" by encouraging a shift in emphasis away from real-life people to the pixillated world of a computer screen.

However invaluable the Web can be as a research tool, Mowlam said, "I would find it very sad if the information on a Web site became the focus of an election."

There is certainly no chance of that happening in the upcoming Italian elections, where voters still choose their representatives by marking ballots with a pencil.

But here, too, there are signs of a turning tide: Silvio Berlusconi, the media magnate running for prime minister, has campaigned on the three-word slogan: "Internet, Impresa, Inglese" or "Internet, Trade and English."

In Italy's last regional elections, notes Giancarlo Mola, a journalist with La Repubblica newspaper, almost all the candidates used the Internet to communicate with voters. In the latest contest, some candidates have been thwarted in their efforts to launch sites by "cyber-squatters" who occupy domains.

Last December, the Radical Party elected a quarter of its executive committee over the Internet, a landmark event in Italian e-voting.

Trends like that are likely to gather pace in the near future. Stryker McGuire, Newsweek magazine's London bureau chief and a panellist at the debate attended by Mowlam, said the Web tends to evolve at a faster rate than the people who use it.

"The Internet is like a very good dog," he said. "It's not going to go away, and one year in an Internet life is like seven in ours."

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