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.

Electoral audits in the US: good, but not perfect

Auditability is one of the elements that makes e-voting attractive to institutions looking to ensure that their elections processes are transparent and accurate. According to Joseph Lorenzo Hall, senior staff technologist at The Center for Democracy & Technology, post-election audits are “the single most important development in election technology in recent years.” Many states in the US use some type of electronic voting, and so some of them carry out audits as well. 

Audits in the US examine the equipment and procedures used to count the votes. The aim of these audits is to make sure that both the election yielded the correct result and everyone involved in the process followed proceedings according to law. To this end, in most cases, one percent of the ballots are recounted by hand in order to compare the result to what was reported on election night. Also, aspects such as poll worker training and chain-of-custody protocols are assessed. 

When it comes to verifying results, recounting one percent of the ballots by hand can be cumbersome in some cases, as some counties are large enough to have 1% represent about 200,000 votes. Besides, one percent is a pretty arbitrary number that could be too much for a large victory margin or too little for a tight match. Thus, new statistically-based techniques have been developed to offer more accurate audits. One is called a “risk-limiting audit” (RLA), where the number of ballots to recount varies depending on the margin of the election. More votes should be counted where victory was attained by a small margin and only a small number of incorrectly counted ballots could make the difference. 

Some election officials don’t agree with having to run post-electoral audits due to budget cuts making it difficult to pay those who perform them and the fact that most of the times nothing irregular shows up at the inspections. What these people are not taking into account is that even if irregularities are uncommon, when they do happen it takes a great amount of money to perform a total recount, so in the long run, audits actually represent cost savings for the governments running them.

There are some flaws in the current American audit system. For example, two states that use DRE technology do not emit vote receipts (also known as paper trails), so it is unclear how they audit their polls. Besides, only 25 states out of 50 make post-election audits a requirement. This is because the choice on whether to make audits mandatory or optional is in the hands of the state legislator. Some say that audits will not stop identity theft, but people need to know their intent is reflected in the results of the elections they have participated in. 

E-voting is finding its way into the American voting system, but it needs to be understood and used well in order for it to solve the problems that manual voting is not solving. Some of the benefits of e-voting come from its auditability, no doubt. A well-implemented e-voting platform guarantees secure, transparent, and accurate elections, but for this to happen the auditability element cannot be removed nor only marginally implemented. 

Find more information about post-election audits in the US here.

E-Voting and Audits in the United States Electoral System

When you go to a government office to get your passport, you expect that the systems in place are reasonable secure and reliable. Similarly, when you are faced with a medical emergency, you expect that the hospital has the proper checks and balances in place to ensure that you receive the care that you need. You expect that the instruments are properly calibrated and your medical records are accurate. When it comes to electronic voting, you should have the same kinds of assurances.