Everyone has the right to vote and participate in elections. And because of that, governments all over the world are constantly reshaping and polishing their methods on how the process of voting in an election should be conducted.
Because of the growing population all over the world, and because of the ever-increasing demand of having an accurate, and fast way of summing up the votes, digital technology is employed to come up with a near-flawless election outcome possible.
But in spite of the speed and accuracy it promises, digital voting still faces a lot of huge issues. One is the endless criticism of it as being very prone to tampering and digital fraud. Such an issue is the main concern of this article
People’s fears about digitizing politics
In his article, Transforming Election Cybersecurity, David P. Fidler, a senior fellow for cybersecurity at the Council on Foreign Relations, discusses a great scare from people regarding digital elections. While most of those who worry and oppose the digitization of elections mostly come from third-world countries, such a problem extends as far as the first-world countries in Europe such as France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain. If a huge number of people are in fact worrying about electronic elections being rigged or tampered with via digital means, then it is a very serious issue that must be given with the most appropriate strategic response.
Threats of Cyberterrorism
How the act of tampering with the votes that are processed by the computerized equipment that accommodates them is believed by people to be done through cyberterrorism. Hacking, as it is widely known, is the act of breaking into a digital system like a database inside a computer, a data server, or handheld devices such as cellphones.
With the aid of AI-powered application software, hacking is believed to be so much easier these days. One of the greatest challenges of digital elections is some powerful entities, such as US President Donald Trump has negative viewpoints about it.
During the 2016 elections, Trump mentioned something about the whole thing as “rigged” by elites and is manipulated by foreign fraudsters. Though Trump successfully became president, his negativity against the digitization of elections will forever be noted. If major entities are so worried about electronic voting, then it would only natural that people would feel the same too.
The negative views about digital elections.
This will most likely continue to appear even for the next decades, however, by understanding the real mechanism behind it, we might get to understand that tampering with the votes is not as easy as it sounds. One of the strongest reasons why digital voting proponents can say that the electronic way is a lot better compared to traditional voting is that the former still has some elements of being traditional.
It has to be acknowledged that the process of digital voting also includes the choosing of candidates via a paper ballot, which will be then fed into a counting machine. After the machine has scanned the data from the voter’s ballot, the machine will then print out a paper report, “a receipt” which will verify that the voting process was successful.
So technically, even though the bulk of the process is digital, it still includes a traditional method that can be later used for counting the votes the traditional way.
The problem with traditional voting.
When physical problems occur like in the event of natural disasters, or when those that are tasked to bring the ballots of the voters to the official counting centers are intercepted by insurgents, then there would be no other way to count or recover those precious votes.
But with digital elections, there are basically 3 copies of the votes: those that are from the voters’ ballots, those that are transmitted through the airwaves, and those that are stored in the storage device inside the voting machines. If one should be lost, then there are still other 2 copies. Though the process could vary from country to country, the core concept remains the same: that digital voting has more contingencies to rely on compared to traditional voting.
The possibility of hackers rigging the results.
About the hacking issue that so many people are so worried about, such a barrage of fear is actually groundless. For one, the voting machines do not have the mechanism to accept or absorb data from outside sources via wireless means.
They have the capability to transmit the data they are holding, but there is no way for them to be accessed from the outside, apart from the ballots that will be fed into them, and the solid-state card that it is inserted with, via its storage device slot. Of course, there is the possibility of hackers rigging the results as the data is transmitted through the airwaves.
Experts like Fidler, would argue that such a feat would require extensive manpower and not to mention heavy-duty computer equipment as well, and they would be right in affirming so. Since there are a greater number of voters compared to hackers, the act of tampering with millions of votes altogether at the same time would be very impossible.
And even if hackers can actually do it, we can still compare the alleged rigged votes to the figures tallied in the paper ballots and those that are stored on the solid-state disk of the voting machine. Clearly, implementing digital elections has better fail-safe options compared to traditional voting.
Conclusion
By looking going through the stipulations mentioned above, it is clear that the major problems facing the implementation of digital elections are hugely based on people’s fears and misconceptions about it. To get around that problem, the government should relentlessly host awareness campaigns that can explain the true mechanism behind electronic voting machines, and how safe and secure they can be.
Also, statistical data that can prove that elections are done faster and will result in a much more accurate counting process must also be freely available for people to look upon and study. In that way, the negative viewpoints about digital elections will gradually vanish to the point that they will be non-existent anymore.
