None of the above: Exercising the right to reject

Image: Tribune.com.pk

The right to choose leaders is one of the most cherished freedoms in a democracy.  

A voter casts his vote for the candidate he wants and hopes for the best. But what is a voter to do if none of the candidates catches his fancy? Does the right to suffrage include the right to reject too? 

The issue has, in fact, attracted considerable attention recently. In India, the Supreme Court has come out with a landmark ruling granting voters the right to reject. The High Court has ordered the Election Commission to provide a “None Of The Above” (NOTA) button on the e-voting  machine, commenting that negative voting would help cleanse the political system in the country.

In the decision, the high court said that "Democracy is all about choices and voters will be empowered by this right of negative voting." 

It added that such a right to reject would lead to a “systemic change in polls and political parties will be forced to project clean candidates".

Aside from India, negative voting is also a fixture in the election systems of Greece, the US State of Nevada, Ukraine, Spain and Colombia.  Russia experimented with negative voting but abolished such in 2006. 

Pakistan also had a None of the Above option in the ballot until the government  dropped it in 2013, saying that elections were meant to "elect and not reject".

Just how significant is this ruling giving voters the right to reject? Many analysts say that such a mechanism puts political parties on notice that voters would no longer put up with mediocre candidates. Voters hitherto resigned to choosing the “least evil” among the lot could suddenly find themselves with the power to reject.  

Yet advocates are apprehensive about the development noting that the right to reject would only be truly efficacious if it materially affects the outcome of elections. They ask, for instance, about the effect of NOTA getting the most number of votes. Will it result in forcing the government to conduct other elections with better candidates? 

Some note with concern that while India e-voting machines will now feature the NOTA button, the candidate who gets the second most number of votes will still be declared winner, rendering the whole effort moot.

E-voting will attest its value again in 2013

Image: Everystockphoto

Guiding the world through the path of automation is no easy task. Some countries have yet to learn some hard lessons with the use of archaic manual methods. In order for the nations to finally modernize their electoral systems, they need proof that e-voting is really the way to go. Last year we saw some impressive models of the effectiveness of voting technology —and the ineptitude of manual voting—, which should be enough to convince anybody of the need for electoral automation. However, it doesn’t stop there. Here are some of the aspects where e-voting will confirm its worth once again in 2013.

Reliability

Elections like the ones we saw last year in Russia, Ghana and Zimbabwe exposed the frailty of manual voting methods. With paper ballots, voters cannot be sure that their preference will be reflected in the results of the polls. Zimbabwe has a second chance to carry out a transparent electoral event now that it will be holding presidential elections this year, but since these will be carried out with manual methods, we might as well be expecting the same dreaded results that came out from last year’s internal referendum, if not worse. The recurrence of crimes such as ballot stuffing and identity theft breaks people’s trust in their electoral institutions. E-voting eliminates these problems easily. 

Speed

Elections need their results to be released to the public immediately after the closure of polling stations. The longer the announcement of final outcomes is delayed, the more the voters are prone to suspect their fairness. The chaos that took over the elections in Honduras should serve as a cautionary tale for other countries, as the final numbers for their November 18 primary elections were not known yet by the end of that month. This failure to deliver results on time could be immediately linked with corruption, which is unacceptable. Electoral technology does not allow for these inexplicable lags, as final results can be made public a few hours after closing the election. 

Security

Bringing back the Russian example, it is incredibly easy to breach security in manual elections. The implementation of transparent ballot boxes and more than 180,000 security web cameras did nothing to prevent the blatant occurrence of carousel voting and ballot stuffing during the March 2012 presidential elections. It becomes obvious then that any effort to eradicate electoral corruption paired with the use of manual methods is destined to fail.

Auditability 

When it comes to set an example about how audits can guarantee transparency to an electoral process, no country comes better than Venezuela. During last year’s Presidential election more than 16 audits certified the correct performance of the system before and after the election: from the voting machines, electronic ballots, and the biometric voter authentication system, to the transmission and totalization of the results. 

Accuracy 

For a voting system, accuracy is essential during the phases of voting, counting and transmission of results, so that the intention of every voter is respected and taken into account. Last year, Mongolians had the chance to employ an e-voting system that promised to be fast and reliable. However, the use of the Precinct-Count Optical Scanners (PCOS) developed by Dominion registered major inconsistencies between the electronic results in some precincts and the audits carried throughout, casting doubts about the credibility of the results.

2013 brings a new set of chances for electronic voting to attest its superiority over the dated and even dangerous manual voting methods. We hope to see more nations choose to successfully automate their elections in order to preserve the reliability, speed, accuracy, auditability and security of their electoral events.

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.

Elections in Russia: Putin’s Triumph Faces Irregularities

Source: dailymaverick.co.za

Russia’s much anticipated presidential elections took place last Sunday. After a long campaign that included sketches of candidates’ faces in cappuccinos, Vladimir Putin was elected Prime Minister of Russia with nearly 64% of the votes.

From the beginning, there was no doubt that Putin would win this time. However, there has been sharp criticism over the alleged lack of transparency of this election. Cameras set up by the Kremlin caught people stuffing multiple voting papers into a ballot box in Dagestan, and there have been reports of observers being kept away from polling stations, even beaten. However, Putin’s campaign chief, Stanislav Govorukhin, rejected these claims, calling them “ridiculous”.

The ballot stuffing cases are proof that voting systems need to be carefully supervised in order to avoid irregularities. The mere electronic scanning of ballots is not guarantee of transparency. 

This is why automated voting needs to be implemented correctly in order to prevent any tampering during elections. We can use as an example the 2010 National Elections in The Phillipines, where electronic scanners where successfully used for the first time in the Asian country, there was an astounding turnout of 76% and the results were accepted by all the participating political parties.

There are a variety of mechanisms designed to make the electoral process more transparent. A next-generation automated and auditable voting system would provide an electoral authority with the proper technological resources that provide the electors with the complete security and accuracy they require to participate without doubts in their electoral processes.