E-voting trial fails to answer technology questions

The ballot box is low-tech but still beats e-voting

While being terribly low tech, the country’s current paper ballot voting system is arguably very resilient.

Ballots can get lost or spoiled, and some may even go missing, but it’s all within the tolerances of the voting system. And if the losers in an election get even a whiff of foul play, they certainly won’t keep quiet about it.

The e-voting systems on trial are, of course, a sign of ‘progress’, and an attempt to increase voter turnout. Voter disengagement is a major issue for all political parties, and the feeling is that if people have the choice to vote at home, they will do so more readily than slogging down to their local polling station.

There are many complex issues surrounding even postal voting, but voting over the internet has serious implications: it is inherently insecure for the simple reason that people’s home PCs are inherently insecure.

The Open Rights Group (ORG) recently published a report on the e-voting trials in May’s local elections. What really alarmed me was the low level of security and oversight of the central systems that were, or should have been, under total control.

The PCs used in the polling and counting often lacked basic security measures, as evidenced by the photos and accounts from ORG’s volunteer election observers. According to the ORG, it would have been very easy to introduce programs onto the systems, and very easy for a program to alter the results without detection.

My favourite two incidents that were obviously mistakes show just how easy it would be to deliberately and covertly change results. The first was a Labour candidate voting over the internet, who discovered the Labour logo next to both his and the Conservative candidate’s name. He was understandably upset.

The second was one of the regional Scottish elections, in which there were more parties than the Excel spreadsheet used to calculate the result could display on screen at any one time. This meant that the initial result showed no votes for the SNP.

An SNP candidate stopped the returning officer on the way to announce the result and managed to argue him into re-examining the data. He did, and the mistake was uncovered. But if this had gone unnoticed, or unchallenged, it would have resulted in two less SNP MSPs, and a different balance of power in the Scottish Executive.

To say that the ORG report raises some serious questions about the trials would be rather an understatement. However, it is important to separate the two issues at hand.

The first issue is whether the current trials were at all effective in increasing voter turnout.

The second issue is whether an effective and trusted e-voting system can ever be designed using today’s technology.

An electronic voting system needs to be either much faster and more efficient than the existing system, or increase voter turnout dramatically – or both.

According to the ORG, the e-voting trials were slower, considerably more expensive, and didn’t affect voter turnout in any significant way.

David Evans is the BCS public engagement manager