E-Voting
In 2002 the Irish government, at what many would consider to be great expense, introduced a pilot exercise in electronic voting. Only three constituencies took part, one being mine. In practice, the process was quite smooth and efficient, perhaps too efficient as some people complained of the loss of the post-election counting spectacle in which the voters were subjected to hours of tension before finally discovering who had won and who had lost. Somehow this traditionally slow phase of the election process was seen as an important factor in bringing proper closure to the election, and giving everyone a chance to become familiar with the final result. The electronic alternative was almost instantaneous, and somehow felt cold and detached from the weeks of intense canvassing that had occurred previously.
But this psychological nuance was trifling in comparison to the gaping holes in the integrity of the new technology. Subsequent investigation found that the e-voting machines were flawed in many ways. Interfering with the software was possible. Corrupted results could not be recovered because there was no audit (even the traditional pencil-and-paper could be re-counted). This resulted in a growing lack of confidence in the concept of e-voting, or at least a lack of confidence in anyone’s ability to implement it properly. In theory, a system as secure as the traditional approach is possible (and probably more secure) but there is no longer any apetite for it.
This, in my opinion, is a pity. We are seeing huge changes in society, the way it is governed, the responsibilities it must carry and the laws it maintains. Recent turmoil in the financial markets is encouraging our political leaders to rethink the relationships between member states, and to propose new ways of managing our affairs that are so radical that consulting the people as a whole would seem necessary to give such ideas the mandate they need. Yet the idea of putting such proposals to a referendum makes the political establishment shudder. Even if various sample polls show support for certain proposals, taking a population-wide vote is such a complex thing that it is only seriously considered if the legal framework absolutely demands it.
Yet millions of people daily express their opinions on a huge variety of things. Granted these expressions relate to trivial things such as who should win the latest national talent contest, but we are slowly getting used to the idea that it is acceptable to comment en masse in public, openly or anonymously. The use of electronic mediation in such actions is seldom given a second thought. Yet when we are faced with important issues we immediately think of commenting with the aid of a stick of wood encasing a piece of graphite. There is nothing special about a pencil, apart from that feeling of permanence that comes with making a mark on paper. If we could reproduce that feeling with better e-voting solutions, one more impediment to regular consultation with the people could be removed.
It won’t happen for this generation, unfortunately. And probably not the next either. The e-voting Web site has been online since this “experiment” started a decade ago, and now it has this simple message: “A Request for Tenders for the sale and / or the provision of recovery services for the equipment was published on 19 January 2012.” So that’s the end of the e-voting experiment. I thought it had a bright future when I participated in the 2002 pilot, but my generation has consigned it to the scrapheap. The next generation will be strongly influenced by our negative perception of the experiment, and maybe (when pencils are extinct) some future generation will revisit the idea. Assuming democracy survives that long.
Categorised as: Legal and Political, Technology