HOW ELECTORAL VOTING MACHINES

ARE GOOD FOR DEMOCRACY

 Compared to a pencil-and-paper system, technology has tremendous potential
to empower citizens, amplify their voices, and allow citizens to hold
governments accountable.
 The scale of the recently held general election in India bears testimony to how
EVM technology addresses electoral fraud and simplify the electoral procedure.
The election witnessed a historic 67 percent voter turnout from nearly 900
million registered voters across 542 parliamentary constituencies.

 Introductions of EVMs led to a significant decline in electoral frauds,

particularly in politically sensitive states which were subjected to frequent re-
polls due to electoral rigging.

Technology may also be significantly

more cost-effective:
The administrative cost of an electronic vote in Estonia is
about half that of using the traditional system. Automation can also
dramatically reduce the immense human workload involved.

A good example is Indonesia, which is now seriously considering a shift

to electronic voting. Indonesia recently combined the presidential and
regional elections into what became the largest single-day voting
exercise in the world. This involved some seven million election workers
and security staff working in the hot summer. More than 550 of
them died of exhaustion and several thousands were hospitalised from
fatigue. Technology has a critical role to play in such scenarios.
Harris study finds technology increased
voter turnout—and concerns about
security
 New research by a University of Chicago scholar found that the ability
to vote with a mobile device increased turnout by three to five
percentage points in the 2018 federal election in West Virginia,
suggesting that mobile voting has the potential to significantly boost
turnout in future elections.
 West Virginia became the first U.S. state to utilize mobile voting in a federal
election, allowing it for overseas voters from 24 of its counties in 2018.
Anthony Fowler, associate professor in UChicago’s Harris School of Public
Policy, studied this trial to assess the likely effects of mobile voting on the size
and composition of the voting population.
 “When West Virginia registered voters living abroad had the opportunity to
vote online, they were six to nine percentage points more likely to request a
ballot, mobile or otherwise, and three to five percentage points more likely to
actually cast a ballot,” said Fowler, whose research uses econometric methods
to study elections and political representation.
 The research, presented at a recent University of Pennsylvania conference  on
election science, underscores that the ability to cast votes on a mobile device
could potentially have a powerful effect on voter turnout while drastically
lowering the cost of voting. At the same time, current survey data show that
many Americans are wary of online voting.


LEARNING FROM THE EXPERIENCES OF

OTHER COUNTRIES
 For example, Fujiwara (2015) finds that EVMs reduced error-ridden and invalid votes in
elections in Brazil. Paper ballots in Brazil required voters to write down the name of
their preferred candidate. This requirement to write automatically led to a
disenfranchisement of less educated people from the electoral process. Following the
introduction of electronic voting which no longer required voters to write, winning
parties directed a substantial fraction of government spending towards healthcare
 expenditure. where Princeton University researchers discovered that
infant health outcomes improved in correlation with phased deployment
of voting machines.

 On electoral fraud
Under the paper ballot system, polling booths would often be captured and
ballot boxes would be stuffed, resulting in an unusually high voter turnout.
EVMs helped tackle this risk by incorporating an important feature—
registering only five votes per minute. Committing electoral fraud would
require capturing polling booths for longer periods. Further, the study also finds
a significant decline in electoral fraud in politically sensitive states where
electoral rigging led to frequent re-polls.

Unlike paper-based elections, EVMs prevent incorrect marking and

spoilage of ballots, ensuring that every vote actually counts.

 On representativeness
The ability of vulnerable citizens (illiterates, women, scheduled castes and
tribes, handicapped, and the elderly) to cast their votes is hampered under the
paper ballot system. In a country where a significant portion of the
marginalized population is illiterate or uneducated, interpretation of paper
ballot signatures or thumb impressions to determine the validity of votes is left
at the discretion of election officers. The votes of vulnerable groups are
virtually eliminated due to being error-ridden. EVM technology ensures that
these groups not only participate in elections, but that their votes also properly
counted.

THE DARK SIDE OF ELECTION TECHNOLOGY

Almost every voting system which has been seriously investigated — EVM or
internet voting platform — has been hacked. In most cases, the hacking has
been trivially easy. There are even YouTube demos on the topic.
As a result, an interesting paradox has emerged: even as developing countries
— such as Namibia, Nigeria, Kenya, and Bangladesh in recent years — are
eagerly hopping on to the EVM bandwagon, technologically advanced nations
— including the Netherlands, US, Canada, Norway, Germany and Ireland —
are rejecting machines en masse and reverting to paper elections.

The nub of the matter is that EVMs were originally designed to automate
elections, not secure them.

 Ensuring voter privacy is easy with a physical ballot box. Casting multiple
ballots into a box automatically anonymises individual votes. Observers
and cameras can track the box. But an electronic voting system is, in
effect, a ‘black box’ — one no longer has any visibility into what is
happening inside. EVMs routinely malfunction, losing, adding or
switching votes.  electronic voting systems are actually more vulnerable
to rigging than paper-based elections.
 Electronic voting machines can have numerous
benefits but are no panacea for electoral fraud. In
fact, they may be more vulnerable to rigging than
paper. Their deployment should not be rushed


BACKLASH IN INDIA AGAINST EVMs

the Congress Party has started a concerted campaign to get the ECI to switch
to paper ballots, because EVMs supposedly no longer inspire confidence in the
electorate.

Former minister and Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhu insists that BJP

would not win a single seat in Punjab if EVMs are replaced with paper. Other
parties in Punjab are also calling for a return to paper.
Technology has remined failed to tame
the savage instinct.
In regions of India, elections remain acrimonious and violent affairs. According
to times of India, Just this May, following assembly elections, post-poll
violence in towns and villages of West Bengal claimed 25 lives and 7,000
women were molested. In 2019, a village was set on fire. In Venezuela, weeks
of violent street protests preceded the polls of 2017 in which 125
people lost their lives.

AMERICANS Disbelief in Bidens win

 According to The Monmouth (“Mon-muth”) University Poll

The biggest shock, though, is the US, which just witnessed its most
controversial election in two decades. According to certain polls, only about
60 percent of Americans believe that Joe Biden’s win was actually legitimate.
Highly contentious audits of machines, ballots and processes are
currently underway in several swing states.

 Risk sharing strategies are also different. To quote election security

expert, David Jefferson: “Vote fraud is much less manageable than e-
commerce fraud. There is no election analog to the natural business
practice of ‘spreading the cost’ or ‘spreading the risk.’ There is no way to
pass on to other voters the ‘losses’ due to illegal ballots cast by
ineligible voters or attackers, or to recover votes changed by malicious
software. There is no ‘insurance’ that one can buy to cover those losses.
There is just no way to compensate for damage done to an election.”

 Cybercrime is a phenomenally large industry: a

study estimated damages at the 6 trillion dollar mark — if cybercrime
were a country, it would be the world’s third largest economy after the
 US and China. Another study estimates online payments fraud over the
2021-2025 period at 206 billion dollars — 10 times the current net
income of global giant, Amazon.

 Technology breakdown on election day can

have inimical impacts
 With banking systems, downtime or glitches are mostly a minor
manageable inconvenience, affecting some people some of the time.
Technology breakdowns during elections may bear direct and long-
lasting impact — loss of citizen confidence, political deadlock and
protests. Poland’s electronic voting system suffered
major glitches during local elections in 2014. Around 1,000 legal
challenges were filed in Polish courts and some 60,000 people protested
on the streets.

 THE WAY FORWARD

 Election technology has had a very troubled history, but there is a light
at the end of the tunnel. Researchers have finally resolved the Gordian
knot, the seemingly-impossible conflict between voter privacy and
transparency. There have been revolutionary game-changing
developments in the past decade: it is now possible to maintain voter
privacy while also ensuring that votes are not tampered with.
 Researchers have devised ways to cryptographically track individual
votes without revealing their content whilst also ensuring that they have
been correctly counted. An easy way to picture this is how one can track
a courier delivery using a tracking number — with the surprising
futuristic feature that the number also serves as a guarantee that no one
has tampered with your package.
 This new paradigm of ‘evidence-based elections’ and ‘verifiability’ gives
voters ironclad guarantees that the votes they cast have not been
manipulated. Voters no longer have to repose blind faith in technology
and poll workers, they can now audit these systems at home using their
 computers or phones. This level of transparency is unprecedented and is
a giant step towards restoring citizen confidence in elections.
  there is a mountain of research still to be done. We need to build every
different kind of EVM and internet voting system under the sun. We
need to trial promising systems at every possible opportunity, in
university elections, trader organisation polls, and bar councils. We need
to conduct high quality pilots with scientific rigour. We need to immerse
ourselves in the e-voting literature and document ecosystem
components, best practices, standards and common pitfalls.
 We need to build bridges with the international research community,
the way Estonia, India and Australia have done. We need bug bounties
and hackathons that meet international standards. We need usability
studies, we need cost-benefits analyses, we need threat models and risk
assessments.
 We need to devise mechanisms to facilitate transparency and third-party
audits suited to Pakistan. We need research on logistics, workflow and
maintenance. If we’re going to set up one of the largest EVM
deployments in the world — over 300,000 machines — we need
environmental impact studies.
 There is an elegant irony in the fact that the real secret to succeeding
with election technology is not just about having the fanciest machine
or the most cutting-edge system. Rather, it is linked to the quality of our
effort, how we engage and collaborate with each other and our genuine
commitment to transparency. To quote Cheeseman again regarding
election technology in Africa: “Unsurprisingly, we find that the greatest
gains from digitisation come from countries where the quality of
democracy is higher and the electoral commission more independent.”