What's the point of e-voting?

updated 1 October 2003

Originally published in the excellent E-government Bulletin

In the months since the Electoral Commission published their evaluation of the 2003 electoral pilots E-Government Bulletin has given a number of different voices in the e-voting debate the space to air their views.

Mark Pack, a LibDem worker, rightly highlighted the problematic management and implementation of the pilots (Issue 143). He alluded to what many of us suspect, e-voting is a sexy, modern project for the government to cheer. Yet with such a diabolical record on major IT projects does it really make sense, he wondered, to invest in electronic elections?

Despite Mr Pack recognising, as did the Electoral Reform Society and many others, that turnout had actually dropped, on average, for the pilots [1] the other authors E-Government Bulletin invited failed to recognise this fundamental point. Julie Hill quoted numerous projects which used to technology to ‘connect with the people’ (Issue 147). A typical argument came from Chris Smy of the Isle of Wight's Youth and Community Service when he said that "e-voting has the potential to excite and inspire young people to participate in politics more than the traditional method of posting a ballot paper in a box."

WHY? We have seen that the e-voting pilots did not boost turnout. It is simplistic to think that participation will be revitalised by channelling politics and democratic activities into the hip new technologies of today. Young people aren’t engaged by technologies alone but by what they can do with them. Being asked to respond to yes or no questions via text message to a council which means nothing to them is not the answer. Participation is a tough, chewy problem which is challenging to define let alone solve. Technical fixes are attractive to many politicians because they delay the inevitable: One day they will have to take a long, hard look at themselves and their conduct. It is the nature of politics itself which is the key culprit for declining participation, not the mechanics of voting.

Andy Smith of Oracle, a supplier in the 2003 e-voting pilots, appeared to dodge the turnout issue (Issue 146). He first claimed that e-voting wasn’t primarily about turnout and that it was unfair to judge it by such criteria alone. Mr Smith then proceeded to effectively argue that e-voting would only make sense if we put even more of the voting process online, including linking campaign sites to electronic ballots. Of course digitising as much of democracy as possible would be a bonanza for Oracle, and Mr Smith even argued that such pervasive use of technology would address voter apathy. The turnout issue had been slipped back in again [2].

Why are people so keen to push e-voting? We know that this year the government overspent on the pilots by around 80%, with Sheffield spending at least £55 per voter (the true figures are higher but will never be known due to the strange budgeting and funding processes used for the pilots). We also know that the average change in turnout was -0.71% for remote e-voting and -2.8% for kiosk e-voting, figures the Electoral Commission and the Government chose not to calculate. Factor in the huge technological risks inherent in adopting e-voting, which could fill another article several times over. Then consider the loss of accountability and scrutiny when elections are run by technology suppliers who refuse to tell us how their systems work. Why do we want e-voting, what’s the point? A slightly faster count which cannot be verified is all that they left have to offer us. It isn’t worth the risk.

As governments across Europe push for e-voting, with the UK and Denmark hoping to pilot electronic systems during the 2004 European elections, the free e-democracy project and the Foundation for Information Policy Research have launched a resolution calling for voter verifiable e-voting. If we must vote with these systems then let us insist that there is a secure audit trail so we can be sure that our vote is recorded as intended. Please support the resolution by visiting the link below.

http://www.free-project.org/resolution/

[1] See http://www.j-dom.org/h/n/WRITING/evoting/ALL/34/ for more on turnout in the 2003 pilots.

[2] For a full rebuttal of Mr Smith’s column by myself and Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation see http://www.j-dom.org/h/n/WRITING/evoting/ALL/35/