2012: An electoral year in retrospective

Image: Freedigitalphotos

2012 was an exciting year for electronic voting and for democracy in general. Many countries around the world gathered their citizens around the polling stations, some of them using the advantages of electoral technology. Let’s take a look at some of the electoral highlights of the year:

March: Putin gets reelected in Russia

Amid accusations of fraud, Vladimir Putin was reelected Prime Minister of the Russian Federation with 60% of the votes. The NGO Golos, defender of transparency during elections, denounced more than 3,500 irregularities committed during the electoral event. The ruling party’s initiative to install more than 200,000 webcams at polling stations to gain credibility backfired because these actually registered several acts of bribery, ballot stuffing, carousel fraud, and misuse of voting coupons.

April: Burma moves forward on the road to democracy

Burma held parliamentary elections for the first time after 50 years of military oppression. Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader who headed the fight for democracy in the country, warned about the setbacks that would emerge during the electoral event, such as damaged ballot cards and names missing from the register. These obstacles are typical of elections held with manual voting methods.

June: Mongolia debut a new voting system for Parliamentary elections

Mongolians went to the polls to select seventy six parliament seats using a new voting system: 2,446 Precinct-Count Optical Scanners (PCOS) were used across 1,905 precincts. In spite the benefits brought forth by automation, problems with the deployment and implementation of the voting technology, raised controversies regarding the validity of the result.

July: Elections in Mexico carried out with questionable electoral technology

Mexico was ready to take the leap from manual to automated voting last year, but leaving the automation process to an incompetent company was a huge mistake that threatened to leave the Latin American country completely devoid of the opportunity to modernize its electoral platform.

October: Brazil and Venezuela demonstrate the power of e-voting

Media outlets all around the world commended Venezuela for its use of electoral technology during their last presidential elections. Meanwhile, Brazil took the challenge of leading more than 140 million voters to the polling places to assign more than 5,500 posts through e-voting, and the challenge was swiftly overcome. These two countries offered proof that vote automation is crucial to carry out multiple elections at the same time with fast and reliable results.

November: USA reelects Obama

Americans attended the polling stations to reelect their incumbent president. Amid the confusing use of different voting methods between constituencies (encompassing both manual and electronic voting), and an audit system that is not exempt from failure, people elected Barack Obama for a second term. 

December: Ghana elects its President amid technical snags

Ghana embraced the modernization of its elections by implementing biometric authentication at the polling centers, but technical glitches led to long delays in some areas. In a tight race, incumbent president John Dramani Mahama of the National Democratic Congress defeated its rival Nana Akufo-Addo.

In 2013 we will be watching as nations around the world walk into the modernization of their elections and the improvement of their democracies.

On the Road to Democracy, Manual Voting Becomes an Obstacle

After almost 50 years of military oppression, the people of Burma were finally able to choose the representatives who would fill 45 parliamentary seats. The country’s by-elections were held at the beginning of this month.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader who won the Nobel Peace Price in 1991 for leading the fight for democracy in the country, and who had been under house arrest for 15 years, was finally able to see the progress of her struggle as a free person, even though she was not able to vote for logistic reasons. People all over the country celebrated this step towards reconciliation.

However, by March the irregularities were already palpable. Suu Kyi warned that these elections would not be free and fair. Voters complained of damaged voting papers and names missing from the register. International observers were invited by the government to oversee the elections, but they were not allowed inside the polling stations. Of course, most of these problems could have been avoided with the implementation of e-voting in the country. Why?

Reliability is one of the many benefits electronic voting offers, since a good and auditable system offers multiple technological resources to recognize fraudulent situations (intent to alter the results), eliminating the possibility of null votes. An auditable electoral system also offers accuracy, so there is no room for misinterpretation of votes or human error in processes like tallying and consolidation. Also, it’s auditable, meaning that your vote is stored in several instances, thus creating protections that guarantee the possibility of multiple audits.

But the road is long, and Burma still has time to learn the best ways to regain the trust that was lost during the years of the military regime.

All and all, this event shows that the hope for democracy to finally reach Burma is stronger and stronger within the hearts of people. Let’s hope that the desire for freedom is stronger than corruption, and that it can finally take over the shadows of the past.