This article is by David Glance, Director of UWA Centre for Software Practice, University of Western Australia. It originally appeared on The Conversation.
opinion/analysis Australia’s current election proves that there has never been a greater need for online electronic voting. The country has come to a political standstill as the laborious process of manual counting of ballot papers is conducted by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC).
The AEC employs around 75,000 people to manage the voting and counting process. An intensely manual process has been further complicated by steps that have been introduced to avoid mishaps that occurred with the counting process in previous elections. During the 2013 election, 1,375 ballot papers went missing in Western Australia forcing WA to go back to the polls.
The answer to the lengthy and problematic voting process should be obvious. In these days of Internet commerce where we entrust our lives to online systems, voting online would seem the natural solution. Absentee voters could vote from anywhere, the cost of voting would be significantly reduced and the results would be instantaneous and accurate.
There would be potentially other benefits in terms of how the names and in particular, their order, was presented to the voter. Mistakes by voters could be prevented, or at least brought to the voter’s attention.
So, for all of the advantages, why hasn’t Australia, and the rest of the world moved to electronic voting?
Well, for a start, there are the experts who claim that we shouldn’t implement electronic voting because “the system might not be secure; the code might not be correct; and, most importantly, if something goes wrong, we might never know.”
All of these things “might” be true but they don’t “necessarily” have to be true and don’t in the end serve as justification for not implementing electronic voting.
For a start, paper-based systems suffer from all forms of problems, some of which may also go undiscovered. For example, critics talk about the fact that electronic voting has to be anonymous and shouldn’t provide the voter with a record of their vote lest they are potentially coerced into revealing what they voted.
Yet, nearly 1.3 million people vote by sending their vote in by mail with no evidence whatsoever that the people who should have completed and sent in those votes actually did so, or were not “coerced” or “bribed” when doing so. People voting in polling booths are not required to provide identification and so could just as easily have been coerced, bribed or substituted during that voting process.
At its extremes, and in countries like the Phillipines, voter coercion is very real as elections are still marred by violence.
Electronic voting does present technical challenges to ensure that people can rely that it has been executed anonymously, accurately and without outside interference. From a technical perspective, electronic voting systems based on Bitcoin’s blockchain technology offer one of the more promising solutions to these requirements.
Companies like FollowMyVote in the US and veri.vote are working on blockchain-based e-Voting systems. In the case of FollowMyVote, the plan is that the solution would be open source and subject to scrutiny,
Blockchain-based voting has the benefit that voting can be done online anonymously and the process of that vote cryptographically recorded by a large number of systems, each validating the actual vote. Theoretically, this validation could be extended to outside scrutineers of the process.
Recording votes on the blockchain could be combined with two-factor authentication such as that employed by a system used in Utah recently. This system allowed online voting for the Republican Party’s presidential nominee during the recent US primaries.
Despite criticism against some existing voting systems, technological solutions could be found to create a verifiable and secure online voting system that would allow full democratic participation that is fully auditable. At the very least, a replacement of the postal ballot portion of the election with such a system would present no greater risk than the current process.
Introducing an electronic system partially this way would also allow the public a period of time to adjust to the practice of online voting. An added advantage of online voting would be that for those voters who like traditions, less time could be spent queuing to vote and more time eating a “sausage sizzle” with friends.
By David Glance, Director of UWA Centre for Software Practice, University of Western Australia. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Absolutely, it also needs to be secure and not able to be tampered with.
There is no reason, in this day and age, I need to travel to a polling place and then stand in a queue for 20 minutes to cast a vote, and then for it to take 2 weeks to be counted.
I shoul dbe able to do it from my PC at home, the same as I do online banking, and the absolute results should be available at 6.01pm on Election day.
I think that electronic voting is coming but I think it is a long way off. There are significant obstacles in the way.
Do a search on the ways to hack Diebold voting machines to see the issues with ensuring that elections are free from manipulation with electronic voting machines. At a minimum voting machines need to have a piece of paper so that manual recounts can be conducted if needed.
The other thing to note is that not everyone is as comfortable with technology for things like remote voting as you or I. Sure most people have a degree of technology literacy but if we are talking about a universal system then everyone has to be. The enrolment process to make this sort of thing secure would need to be ridiculously simple and not open to privacy abuse. Sure you could use some sort of biometric enrolment but if the fingerprint database was compromised people aren’t easily able to change their fingerprints.
The actual count on election night is relatively quick. It is the declaration and postal votes that take the time. Unfortunately this is probably the use case that has the most obstacles.
I don’t think it needs to be too complex, something like the ID you get for a census should suffice, single use, but I like the idea of positive confirmation, so you should get an email confirmation of what your “accepted” vote was, and also be able to look it up retrospectively, and if any tampering is detected, then for formal review takes place afterwards. If it turns out to be endemic, the results are made null and void, and the culprits end up with a long jail sentence.
a “re-election” wouldn’t be such a hardship if its all done online.
“… the results are made null and void …”
Yeah.
Ri-i-i-i-ight.
The minute we lose annonymity in voting is when big brother starts profiling how we voted. I mean geez they track our meta data now on a whim and a prayer (just ask renai re AFP and NBN investigations).
Voting stat demographics and breakdowns there’s no way the pollies won’t jump at the chance to better analyse how we voted!
The author criticises expert opinions because of some hypothetical problems (which are real concerns) then goes on to propose a number of hypothetical solutions.
I don’t even see what the problem is. Parliament was not going to sit any sooner, besides, until the writs are returned, etc. the incumbent government still holds office and things remain in caretaker mode. The country doesn’t stop – it’s purely a media generated circus.
Electronic voting wouldn’t be any cheaper. The software development, verification, testing, configuration and hardware costs would be large. What would be useful is OCR machines to sort the papers.
“Yet, nearly 1.3 million people vote by sending their vote in by mail with no evidence whatsoever that the people who should have completed and sent in those votes actually did so, or were not “coerced” or “bribed” when doing so.”
A flawed comparison. Votes by mail could suffer from bribes or tampering. BUT this could only be done one vote at a time. Whereas in electronic voting the WHOLE LOT of votes could be altered AT THE SAME TIME either by intent or by malfunction.
Electronic voting. No bloody way Hosea. Sorry.
Here’s a good argument why it’s not a good idea: https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI
The least they could do is make the name checking off electronic. Give the people on the day a 3G/4G dongle with a VPN connection back to the AEC servers, person walks in, says their name and address, person ticks it off on the system, job done.
Means they don’t have to worry about ‘have you voted before’ because they would be connected to the servers that know if you have or not.
OK, the AEC has nothing to do with this one, but, MyGov anyone?
Alinta Energy in WA wanted to see my Drivers’ Licence number as part of their signup system. Guess how much pain they will feel when they get hacked and my identity is threatened?
Seriously David, with the advantages of your position, do you really believe electronic voting is or could be as secure as paper polling?
What a joke that paper polling is secure – do you mean those large cardboard boxes people shove their paper into, or the high security truck they throw those boxes into on their way to counting? Who said we even know definitively who voted – No-one checked my ID when I made a paper vote.
These arguments sound like the ones we faced when banks were moving to balances over the phone or on the web vs. passbooks. Yes there are issues, yes they can be managed or overcome, but will the ‘new’ really be worse than the ‘best’ outcome in a paper system, where votes can be accidentally be put in wrong piles, or lost, where people do not understand if their vote is valid thanks to ever changing rules, and where postals can be done with no checks or balances. In the new systems you could get people to vote wherever they are, and counts could be evaluated against stats and phone records etc to see if they were being rigged. Yes, some people don’t have phones or internet or whatever, but they could still turn up to a booth manned by a few less people who could rapidly scan licences or medicare cards and then hand hold the person through some screens to make their vote (and even be told it is valid and conforms). Frankly this is just one of those phases we have to go through on our way towards better solutions.
Q. Who said we even know definitively who voted – No-one checked my ID when I made a paper vote.
A. OK, to make a significant difference to the results for even one electorate, we need, what? 500 folks pretending to be me? Or someone voting 500 times pretending to be me?
Q. These arguments sound like the ones we faced when banks were moving to balances over the phone or on the web vs. passbooks.
A. Time has passed. 20 years later the world has grown more sophisticated. These days we simply steal your identity and suck your account dry. Simple, yes?
Q. Yes there are issues, yes they can be managed or overcome, but will the ‘new’ really be worse than the ‘best’ outcome in a paper system, where votes can be accidentally be put in wrong piles, or lost, …
A. Seriously that’s the “worst”, not the “best”. And AEC at least has made huge progress since 2014.
Q. … where people do not understand if their vote is valid thanks to ever changing rules, …
A. My wife had no problems with the simple rule change. I’m sure she’s less clever than you are.
Q. … and where postals can be done with no checks or balances.
A. See Q1 above.
Electoral Commissions are not perfect. But they can easily be made better with relatively small annual budget increases and some constructive thinking.
Now, about security. Does “WikiLeaks” and similar ring any bells? Or hacking into “secure” NSA-type networks? The fact is that there are people around who do this sort of thing for fun as well as profit, and they get better every year. And they are actively heped by those in government or other positions of power who fervently believe computers can be made secure even with a nil security budget. Do you know what a bot-net is?
Seriously, with the advantages of your position, do you really believe electronic voting is or could be as secure as paper polling?
I disagree with a few of your points, but don’t want to argue.
(basically it comes down to electronic != internet with a side of electronic != no paper anywhere)
but:
“A. My wife had no problems with the simple rule change. I’m sure she’s less clever than you are.”
way to go.
I guess the point about voting 500 times somehow relates – but while only one vote for me the human will be OK (if its noticed) on paper, how is it possible at all on electronic system – the first vote would be counted, the second person would be hauled up for a discussion and a proof on ID? It would be easy given the paper has no mark to connect it back to the roll that someone could easily make 500 votes by taking other names (ie. by reading mail or just upside down reading the register) which would have a material impact on some of the close polls.
While there are lots of great stories on identity fraud given the speed of media nowadays, the fraud is overall is about 0.05% – see http://www.apca.com.au/docs/fraud-statistics/Australian-payments-fraud-details-and-data-2015.pdf – given that we have almost 98% of people registered to vote vs. 94% who do, I guess that 0.05% would be considered to be a marginal loss rate?
I’m glad you have a smart wife, and who says she’s not as clever, but back in the rest of australia the informal vote has been climbing for years, because people don’t know what the preferential system is or how to number the forms etc – its detailed here and I am sure we will see just as much when this years numbers slowly eek out of the paper system http://australianpolitics.com/voting/informal/house – 5% is more than enough to shift a large number of seats – would it favour liberal or labour?
Given the last time the AEC had a decent look at this issue in 2001 the internet had only been around 5 years and the iPhone hadn’t been invented its worth try to solve the problem again now.
So not sure why you want me to be serious given my position, but yes really…I think its probably much more secure. Of course, if you are worried we could always get that nice Chinese company picking up the paper votes to whip up a quick system for us.
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