The Family Guide to Digital Freedom

E-voting is coming, or has already arrived, in my Country. How can I understand if it's implemented properly, without risks of abuse? What is the right way to e-vote?

Let's start with the real question that almost nobody asks: is e-voting necessary in the first place? Does it really makes any sense at all?

In order to understand which problem(s) e-voting should actually solve,what is real cost is and how things are going now, we will now shortly review the main justifications presented for e-voting, and then look at some reports from the trenches.

E-Voting is good because...

....it stimulates people to vote

Nice start. Did you realize that they are insulting you, by treating you like an infant? "Bobby will eat his peas quietly if the TV is on"! Do they think you can't hold a pen? Why aren't you voting? Is it really because a pen signature on a sheet of paper is oh so much more boring (or difficult) than placing a finger on a monitor? Or is it because all the available choices are equally depressing, wherever you read them? People who don't vote because it's boring have bigger problems, and probably deserve anybody who is elected thanks to their absence.

Said this, even if gadgets were really a solution to low voters turnout, there is no doubt that scratch-n-sniff stickers or Playboy calendars would be a much more effective, cheaper and safer solution than any untested technology.

....it reduces voters' errors

See the comment above on placing a finger versus holding a pen. Anybody who
seriously believes this has never stopped one second to compare the number of people who can still write a simple note without assistance to that of people who still stare at a computer screen. Pen and paper are still immensely more familiar and less intimidating than computers.

....it reduces counting errors and frauds

Too many young peoples are unable to count properly and part of the fault is just the misuse of computers, but we digress. Sure, humans make many more errors than computers when counting manually. But it only takes one flaw in the computerized booths, or one person rewriting their output remotely, to alter many more votes, much more quickly, than if humans were doing the job and checking each other's results. If vote counters are humans, you have to corrupt or menace many more people to steal thousands of votes and get away with it.

... it's much faster

How often will you be called to vote in the next ten years? Every day? Elections of Parliaments, Presidents, Majors and similar normally take place every two to five years. A country without e-voting, but with a decent procedure will know the result, without ambiguities, in a couple of days anyway. If this doesn't happen, there are problems that no e-voting could fix. What is the difference between knowing the new President four years and two days after the previous election and knowing him or her four years and two hours later? How can you justify rebuilding the whole system from scratch to gain about one day every few years?

... it saves money

Sure. A lot. Enough to fix the whole country deficit, no question about it. Like we just said, how often will you be called to vote in the next ten years? Please take all the money spent to count votes in the last manual election and divide it by the whole State budget between two consecutive election. The percentage savings would be greater if we just switched the light off every time we go to the bathroom. Any savings caused by e-voting would be much smaller than the dangers it creates. If you don't believe this, just keep reading.

E-voting nightmares

In July 2006 in Sacramento experts found what may be "the worst security flaw we have seen in touch screen voting machines". They reported that, having access to these machines, it would be possible to completely rig an election without leaving a trace.

In august 2006, election officials reported that some machines were causing difficulties in several counties of Nebraska because they were not set up properly.

In the same month, voting machine failures stroke again in Alaska: they forced elections officials to hand count and manually upload vote totals from several precincts across the State.

In september 2006,other tests found out that “Hotel Minibar” Keys can open voting machines.

In October, Canadian columnist Michael Geist analyzed the status of e-voting and concluded that "the reliance on Internet and electronic voting may inadvertently place the validity of the election process at risk".

These are just a little part of the many proofs that this technology isn't mature enough to be trusted. More examples and other information on e-voting are on the Digifreedom.net website.

Why banalize voting?

Even ignoring the practical problems, the whole concept of e-voting is quite depressing, really. In our culture, we still place much more importance in signatures on papers than in shiny computer monitors. Most people still look at computers as mere gaming stations, fancy gadgets or, in the best case, super typewriters: not really relevant stuff.

Voting is a privilege and a achievement. Reducing it to an arcade game is
dangerous for democracy. It sends the message that voting is just like going to a soda vending machine, that is not important (just what the establishment would like us to think, isn't it?). When we have to put something on paper, instead, we take it much more seriously. We think about it first. This is how voting should remain.

Is there a solution?

Yes. Do without e-voting, because there is no meaningful reason to adopt it yet. Some activists say that e-voting is a good thing, as long as it is done with software which is Free as in Freedom, software that everybody can check without restrictions. The Open Voting Foundation promotes just the adoption of this way to e-vote worldwide. There is no doubt that, if computers must replace paper in the voting booth, the whole system, both hardware and software, must be as transparent as possible: as far as software is concerned, Free Software would be the only way to go for e-voting.

Said this, promoting e-voting just because it can be done with Free Software continues to not make sense. If the software running the system were open it would still not solve any of the problems listed above, or give citizens any meaningful advantage.

In the real world, having the source code of a voting machine would change nothing at all at the voting booth. 99% of voters would not know what to do with it anyway, and what should the rest do? Block everybody else in the line for 30 minutes, while he or she checks the source code in the machine against the copy in his or her pocket? Or disassembles the machine to check that it was not modified to hide that it runs the wrong software? Come on!

Actually, e-voting could even make thing worse, decreasing the guarantees that counting is done without frauds. With paper, almost everybody has the skills to be an election official and figure out (like any voter standing by in that moment) if somebody hid one ballot paper under the table, or declared it contained one more vote for his or her preferred candidate.

In this sense, e-voting may even be anti-democratic, a very elitist thing to do: "only citizens who can program are good enough to supervise the exercise of democracy"? No, thanks.