And The Oscar goes to: Precinct voting

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Rush Holt, U.S. House Representative for New Jersey's 12th congressional district and Star-Ledger guest columnist, just published an article titled "Oscars put online voting problems back in the spotlight", in which he uses the ongoing online voting process for the 85th edition of the Oscars, to showcase the challenges Internet voting is facing.

In many respects, Representative Holt coincides with our views on Internet voting - expressed in the post Internet Voting, Strike Two. According to his words, "The fundamental problem is that online election systems must serve many contradictory ends. The system must be easily accessible to every registered voter, yet prevent unauthorized access by hackers. The system must credibly determine a voter’s identity, yet maintain the anonymity of each ballot."

The system also must be accessible to a variety of computer hardware and software, yet not be vulnerable to malware or bugs on any user’s computer. The system must use cutting-edge cryptographic tools, yet be simple enough that my 99-year-old mother can use it. And it must be accessible 100 percent of the time, though it will be a tempting target for denial-of-service attacks".

Another important point made in the article comes from a senior adviser at the National Institute of Standards and Technology who said, “Internet voting systems cannot currently be audited with a comparable level of confidence in the audit results as for those for polling place systems. Malware on voters’ personal computers poses a serious threat that could compromise the secrecy or integrity of voters’ ballots. And the United States currently lacks an infrastructure for secure electronic voter authentication.”

So, the very same attributes that make Internet voting so appealing, are hampering its adoption. Internet is a sexy offer, yet there are many issues that need to be addressed before its use can expand: Secrecy of the vote, security, freedom of speech, etc. 

Although we agree with Representative Holt on many issues, we draw a line when he favors the paper ballot over an electronic memory as the record of the vote. Any form of manual voting implies someone, or something interpreting the intent of the voter. Ultimately, that leads to potential controversies as auditing become less reliable. The 2000 Presidential election recount of 175,037 votes in Florida became a nightmare when auditors had to interpret the will of the voters expressed in the butterfly ballots.

Direct-recording electronic voting machines that provide voter-verified paper audit trails are the most advanced and reliable existing method to capture the will of voters. There is no interpretation necessary, and the printed version of the vote stands as a safeguard for post electoral audits.

Auditability of e-voting strengthened by vote receipts

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Auditability is one of the main characteristics of a safe and reliable e-voting system. Some say that the main advantage of manual voting over electronic voting is that there is physical evidence of each and every ballot cast, but the truth is that the best electoral technology not only stores the electronic record of each vote, but also includes a printed version of it. This makes e-voting even more auditable than any election carried out through manual methods.

A Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT), or vote receipt, is the printed version of the ballot cast by a citizen over the touchscreen on the voting machine. Voters can check that the vote marked on the vote receipt matches the one given on the machine before introducing it into a box. The stored vote receipts will be used to manually verify electronic results when closing audits are performed. This way,

manual voting’s possibility to physically account for every vote is combined with all the benefits of e-voting.

2004 marked the first time that vote receipts were used in a national election, when the referendum to remove President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela was carried out. The addition of vote receipts to the automated electoral solution provided by Smartmatic was essential to monitor and confirm results from this electoral exercise. Later in 2007, the citizens of Curacao were able to exert suffrage through

electronic voting using Smartmatic’s auditable solution in a speedy and secure way, backed up by vote receipts to ensure complete auditability. Of the 74,342 registered votes at the election, not one was voided due to technology failures.

A robust e-voting platform already has many benefits that make it dependable: the protection of voter anonymity, the impossibility of it to be tampered with due to its strong data encryption software, and the speed of its automated precinct count, which yields results the same day the election is carried out. However, when it comes to shielding democracy, there is no such thing as too much security. Auditing must be done at all instances, including if possible one where electors can participate and serve as witnesses of the accuracy of results. This way, the exercise of democracy is validated not only by international representatives who act as electoral monitors, but also by the citizens themselves.

India, the natural migration towards paper trail voting machines

In May 2004, the world’s largest democracy conducted its first automated national elections using approximately one million Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) to allow 671 million voters express their preference. This event was the culmination of a long and progressive adoption process that started in 1977.

The Direct-Recording Electronic Voting Machines used, were developed by a public sector company, the Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL), with the purpose of bringing higher levels of transparency and accuracy to elections.

In spite of the considerable benefits automation brought forth to this nation, since February 2010, the Indian Electoral Commission has been receiving complaints from different activists groups, political parties, and researchers who challenge the system’s precarious security features. Their main argument has been the EVMs’ vulnerability to tampering at stages such as: the moment the software that runs them is burned onto their chips, while the machines are stored before an election, and during the period between the voting and the tallying.

These same detractors of the technology used in India consider that, by providing a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT), the problem could be solved. The VVPAT represents a simple mechanism that allows contrasting the electronic results with the manual counts of the paper trail. Any candidate, in the event of a suspicion of tampering, could request a recount on the basis of the paper records. One such system was developed by the world leader in electronic voting Smartmatic and has been used, with great results, in Venezuela and other countries since the year 2004. In fact, Venezuela’s 2004 presidential recall referendum constituted the first election in the world in which a printed receipt was produced by the machine with each vote.

To comply with the growing request for transparency, Indian electoral authorities demanded their two EVMs suppliers, government-run Bharat Electronics Ltd and Electronics Corp. of India Ltd, to adapt the voting machines and include the printing of a paper record. The printed receipt will allow voters to verify that their vote was cast correctly, to detect possible election fraud or malfunction, and to provide a means to audit the stored electronic results.

In the last few months, field tests have already been conducted with unsatisfactory results. According to analysts and authorities, approximately one in 20 votes polled in Delhi, one of the four places where the pilot poll was conducted, did not have a corresponding paper ballot. Such a high level of discrepancies has prompted authorities to delay the implementation of EVM with VVPAT in real elections until more satisfactory results are achieved in the field tests.

India, together with Brazil and the United States, were pioneers in the adoption of voting technology. With a voting population of 714 million, representing 23% of the entire voting population of the world, India needs to migrate towards VVPAT to keep up with the citizens’ demands.