The Truth About Electronic Voting Machines… What Do You Think About Them?

Why Does Most of the World Still Not Trust Electronic Voting?

Electronic voting sounds like the obvious next step in a world where we can put a man on the moon, operate cars without drivers and ask a computer to write an article about why computers shouldn’t necessarily be trusted to count our votes. Yet despite decades of technological advancement, electronic voting is still far from the global norm.

According to data from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, better known as International IDEA, only 34 of 178 countries surveyed use some form of electronic voting at either the national or subnational level. That means roughly four out of every five countries in the database do not use electronic voting. That statistic by itself doesn’t mean those countries have outlawed voting machines. There is an important distinction between something being illegal and simply not being used. But it does raise an obvious question: If electronic voting is supposed to make elections faster, easier and more technologically advanced, why hasn’t most of the world embraced it?

The answer is not necessarily because these countries are technologically backward. In many cases, the opposite is true. Countries that have experimented with electronic voting have had to confront some very modern problems such as, cybersecurity, software reliability, transparency, auditing, public confidence and the basic question of whether an ordinary voter can independently verify that the machine counted the vote correctly. And that last part matters.

The Differences Between Paper Ballots & Electronic Ballots

With a traditional paper ballot, there is something remarkably low-tech about the process. A voter marks a piece of paper. The ballot exists physically. Election workers can count it. Observers can watch the process. If there is a dispute, there is a physical object that can potentially be examined and recounted. Electronic voting introduces another layer between the voter and the final result. Instead of simply asking whether a ballot was marked correctly, voters and election officials may also have to trust hardware, software, programming, security procedures and the people who designed and maintained the system.

That doesn’t automatically make electronic voting insecure. It does, however, create additional points that have to be secured and independently verified. And several countries have discovered that convincing the public to trust those systems can be considerably harder than building the machines in the first place.

Germany is one of the more frequently cited examples. The country’s Constitutional Court ruled in 2009 that the use of certain electronic voting machines failed to meet constitutional requirements for public verifiability. The issue wasn’t simply whether computers could technically count votes. The larger question was whether citizens could adequately understand and verify the essential steps of the election process without having to trust the machine’s internal software.

The Netherlands also moved away from electronic voting after concerns arose about the security and transparency of its systems. Ireland spent substantial money developing an electronic voting system before ultimately abandoning the project after concerns about reliability, cost and public confidence. Norway also experimented with Internet voting before discontinuing the system.

So, What Does This Prove?

None of these examples prove that electronic voting is inherently fraudulent or that paper elections are automatically secure. But they demonstrate something more interesting. Countries that have actually experimented with electronic voting have sometimes concluded that the benefits weren’t worth the additional problems and public-trust issues. That distinction gets lost in political arguments in the United States.

One side can point to electronic voting and see technological progress. The other can see a potential cybersecurity nightmare. Both sides can find examples supporting their position. But there is a much more fundamental issue underneath the argument: Can voters independently verify an election’s outcome without simply being told to trust the technology? That is a legitimate question regardless of political party.

There is also an important misconception worth clearing up. Saying that approximately 144 of the 178 countries in the International IDEA dataset do not use electronic voting does not mean those countries have banned voting machines. Some may have never adopted them. Some may use electronic systems only for particular elections or particular groups of voters. Others may use computers for counting paper ballots rather than allowing voters to cast their ballots electronically. But the larger statistic remains striking.

Electronic Voting is NOT the Worldwide Standard. It is the Exception.

Countries have different electoral systems, different laws and different levels of technological infrastructure, so there is no single reason explaining why most nations continue to rely heavily on paper ballots or other non-electronic methods. But concerns about security, transparency, auditability, cost, reliability and public confidence repeatedly appear in the debate. And perhaps that is the real lesson. Technology isn’t automatically an improvement simply because it is newer.

When you’re ordering a pizza, upgrading from a landline to an app is probably progress. When you’re deciding who controls the government, the standard should arguably be a little higher. The debate over electronic voting therefore shouldn’t simply be reduced to “machines are good” versus “machines are bad.” The more important question is whether an election system can produce results that are not only accurate, but independently auditable, publicly verifiable and trusted by the people who are expected to accept the outcome.

For something as important as an election, asking people to trust a black box isn’t necessarily the technological future. Sometimes, the boring piece of paper sitting on the table has one enormous advantage. Everybody can see it.

In the US, Who Makes These Voting Machines?

Sources for the Article

• International IDEA – Use of E-Voting Around the World
• German Federal Constitutional Court – 2009 Electronic Voting Decision
• The Irish Times – E-voting machines to be scrapped
• The Irish Times – Ten-year saga with huge cost to taxpayer