The Dogged Pursuit of Easier, Safer Voting

The Economist

October 26, 2012

Bertie Ahern, Ireland’s former prime minister, once lamented his countrymen still cast ballots with “stupid old pencils.” Now, his enthusiasm for electronic voting looks premature.

Ireland has just scrapped 7,500 devices, bought for $66m in 2002-2003 but never used amid worries about reliability. A recycling firm bought the lot for a little more than $90,000—about $12 each.

Electronic voting machines are popular in emerging economies. But they are falling out of fashion in the rich world, where internet voting is a growing trend. Nine European states have tested electronic machines, yet only Belgium uses them widely.

America invested heavily in digital devices after faults in mechanical ones plagued its presidential election in 2000, but its ardor is cooling, too. In 2006, 38% of American voters used electronic machines; only a third will do so in November’s poll. Authorities now prefer optical scanners that tally paper ballots.

Doubts about security are causing the retreat. Observers cannot easily check for faults or verify electronic tallies if machines produce no paper trail. “The best you can do is press the button again and hope you get the same number,” said Anne-Marie Oostveen at Oxford University.

Nor are voting machines immune to clever frauds. In 2006, Dutch campaigners rigged a device to miscount votes, and then taught it to play chess.

Used around the world

Yet electronic machines do help in poorer places, where paper elections are trickiest to organize. Of the 18 states using or testing electronic voting machines, according to the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), 12 are in South America or Asia. Brazil deployed them nationwide in 2000, in part to help illiterate citizens. India followed four years later. Its machines register no more than five votes per minute to hinder ballot stuffers.

Venezuela’s are the most advanced. To prevent fraud, citizens voting in the country’s presidential elections Oct. 7 identified themselves with a fingerprint. Their machines also produced paper receipts to enable audits. Jimmy Carter, the former American president and an election observer, called Venezuela’s electoral process “the best in the world.”

Amid patchy enthusiasm for machines, interest in internet voting is soaring. Australia and Canada are among the 11 countries that have used online voting in a real election, says Ben Goldsmith, an expert at the IFES.

In November, 23 American states will allow voters overseas to receive or return their ballots via email. Ballots cast online made up 24% of the votes in Estonia's 2011 parliamentary election, up from 5.5% in 2007. Norway may allow internet voting in its general election next year.

To reduce the impact of technical failures or cyber-attacks, Estonia allows citizens several weeks to vote online. To discourage vote-buying or voter intimidation, electors may cast their ballot multiple times during the election period, though only the final vote counts. But those who wait until election day must vote on paper at a traditional polling station; this ensures last-minute system crashes cannot disenfranchise voters.

Some hope internet voting could help to encourage more people to vote. Since the 1950s, turnout in British elections, for example, has fallen by more than 20%; in 2010, less than half of all 18 to 24-year-olds voted.

But optimists have little evidence to cite. High turnouts during early tests in Switzerland fell back as curiosity in the new system dwindled; abstainers rarely mention the inconvenience of voting when asked why they stay away.

Where it could work

The internet may make postal votes work better. Almost a fifth of American ballots are now cast by mail, a threefold increase over 30 years. But postal voters are twice as likely to mark paper ballots incorrectly. They also depend on increasingly erratic snail-mail services.

Countries keen to retain links with emigrants hope easy online voting will keep diasporas engaged. In June, French expatriates used the internet to elect parliamentary representatives. But few countries will easily emulate success in Estonian, which is renowned for cybersecurity.

Countries such as America and Britain that shun national ID cards find it hard to identify their citizens online. Elsewhere, worries about hackers abound. In 2010, computer scientists at the University of Michigan infiltrated a test poll in the District of Columbia, reprogramming the software to play a well-known ditty whenever a vote was cast. They also hacked into security cameras to watch election administrators grapple with their attack.

A deeper question is how online voting affects the choices citizens make. Remote voters have more time to make informed decisions than those herded through busy voting booths, says Michael Alvarez at the California Institute of Technology, especially if many races run simultaneously. Yet people who vote while lounging in their underwear may do so less solemnly.

A small study in Finland found that voters who cast ballots from home tended to take extreme positions, while going to polling stations made people less selfish. Technology can help citizens vote, but politicians must make them care. No app exists for that.