Absentee voting in the US ranges from paper ballots mailed in by voters, all the way through to email voting for overseas citizens and military. This year, New Jersey has opened up email voting to those who have been displaced by Hurricane Sandy. This has led many to ask a rather interesting question: Why not just allow everyone to vote via email? Heck, let’s go one better: Why can’t Americans vote via the internet?
The United States, with an average turnout of 48%, has one of the worst voter turnouts in the world. The general consensus is that e-voting (internet voting, email voting, SMS voting, telephone voting) would lower the barrier to entry, thus increasing turnout. Suddenly, all of those people without a car, on holiday, or too busy at work, would be able to cast their vote. Viva la democracy, right?
Without actually diving into the convoluted cesspit that is politics, e-voting just isn’t that simple. On the most basic level, politicians would simply never go for it. The US electorate is a very well-known variable that is accurately modeled from decades of polling and analysis. If you suddenly allowed e-voting and opened the flood gates for tens of millions of extra voters, it would be almost impossible to predict the outcome of elections. Can you see a law enacting e-voting making its way successfully through Congress?Beyond that, though, secret ballots are an intrinsic part of the democratic process. There is a reason that you cast your ballot in a booth or behind a curtain: It’s to prevent coercion, and other types of electoral fraud. The idea is that you step into a voting booth, and no one ever knows who you voted for. Even if your abusive spouse or union rep forces you to vote for a particular candidate, you can always change your vote in the booth without anyone being the wiser.
With e-voting, it’s a lot more complex. In Estonia, the entire electorate is allowed to vote via the internet, by means of an ID card. If you have someone else’s ID card and their PIN, you can cast their vote. There is nothing to stop, say, the administrator of a care home from gathering up the ID cards and PINs from a bunch of elderly people and casting their votes. Likewise, an abusive spouse could easily beat the PIN out of their partner. Instead of one man, one vote, this becomes one man, many votes.
In Estonia’s case, they try to mitigate against misuse by allowing for unlimited vote changes, up until the final day of the election — but this still doesn’t really get around the fact that whoever has the ID cards has the votes. Real-world polling stations obviously protect against such abuse by being public, accountable spaces — it’s all but impossible for a single person to cast multiple votes, or for an abusive person to frogmarch another voter into a polling booth.
And then there’s security. It is definitely possible to create a secure e-voting platform, but it requires a lot of effort to do it properly — in most cases, more time/money than the government is willing to spend. As we’ve seen in the US, where some states use digital machines (pictured right) rather than paper ballots, poor design, programming, testing, and implementation have resulted in a wide range of issues that have caused many votes to be lost. Paper ballots have their own security risks, but for the most part it’s much easier to implement a secure paper ballot system.In the US, the only form of e-voting is by email or fax. In essence, this process involves you being sent a ballot form, which you fill in and then return via email (take a digital photo of the ballot) or fax. In some cases, you must also return your paper ballot via regular post — but that’s it, as far as security is concerned. While it varies from server to server, email is undoubtedly one of the least secure and unaccountable internet services. It would not be hard to send back multiple ballots with forged email headers. To be honest, it is rather crazy that New Jersey is accepting unsecured email ballots — I hope they know what they’re doing, and that they don’t get exploited today.
Ultimately, e-voting is a nice idea, but the implementation is so difficult that we’ll probably never see it rolled out in a large country like the US. Estonia, the only country in the world that allows the entire nation to use e-voting for parliamentary elections, has an area of 17,000 square miles and a population of 1.3 million — or about 1/300 the size of the USA. The USA is so powerful that the repercussions of a faulty or insecure e-voting system would be monumental — and so far, no one in the USA has even begun to plant the seeds for a secure, trustworthy, and end-to-end auditable e-voting platform.
For the time being, then, paper ballots are definitely the future of voting in the US — if only to prevent Anonymous or other hacktivist groups from electing someone from their own ranks.
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