US problems with e-voting and suppliers' refusal to allow testing
will not fill UK e-voters with confidence. Bill Goodwin
reports.
The Government is pressing ahead with plans to replace the
traditional paper ballot method of voting with electronic and
Internet based alternatives with alarming speed. If ministers have
their way electronic voting could become the norm in local
elections within three years, and in national elections within a
decade.
Senior cabinet members see e-voting as a solution to voter apathy.
Where politicians have failed to inspire reluctant voters, many
hope that text messages and Internet voting will prove
irresistible.
The political interest in e-voting has been heavily influenced by
the promises of IT and equipment suppliers that it will deliver
more accurate and quicker election results at comparable or lower
cost.
This persuaded the Government to invest £3.5m in trailing
electronic voting systems in the local elections in May this year.
This month it issued an invitation to tender for further e-voting
trials to begin in 2003. Public consultation is also under way.
With the exception of the Electoral Reform Commission, which has
raised questions about the maturity of e-voting technology, there
has been barely a note of public dissent. But this week a world
expert on e-voting, Rebecca Mercuri of Bryn Mawr College,
Pennsylvania, urged Cabinet Office officials to think again.
"It is a known fact that the computer industry does not have the
capability, at present, to assure a safe reliable election using
only electronic devices," she said. "Investigation of supplier
claims and failures of performance in actual elections have
demonstrated major flaws."
Mercuri's contention is that e-voting systems present serious
security risks and are much more vulnerable to fraud, manipulation
and error than the paper-based equivalent.
The laws of computing, she says, cannot allow anyone to be certain
that the complex software needed to support e-voting is either
fully secure or error free.
As Bruce Schneier, a leading IT security expert, said, "A secure
Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be
the first secure networked application created so far in the
history of computers."
It is inevitable that e-voting systems will be targeted by hackers
and criminal organisations. It is easy to imagine disaffected
groups launching denial of service attacks to disrupt voting, for
example, while personal identification number (Pin) codes, once
issued, can be lost or stolen.
Suppliers' refusal to open up their technology to independent
testing and scrutiny has added to these concerns. Most
manufacturers insist that election officials sign agreements not to
divulge details about the workings of their technology before they
supply it. As a result, none has been independently publicly
scrutinised, and there are no minimum technical standards.
In fact, said Mercuri, "No electronic voting system has been
certified to even the lowest level of the US government or
international security standards. Any programmer can write code
that displays one thing on screen, records something else, and
prints yet another result. There is no known way to ensure that
this is not happening inside a voting system."
But her biggest concern is that if fraud or error is suspected,
current e-voting technologies provide no way for voters to verify
that their votes have been properly recorded or counted. There is
no way to independently audit the results of such a ballot in case
of a dispute.
These risks are not just theoretical. In the last presidential
election in Florida thousands of electronically recorded votes
disappeared, and in the absence of paper backups, were never
recovered. The effects, many believe, may well have been sufficient
to affect the outcome of the election.
Practical experience in the US and the UK has provided little
evidence to support suppliers claim for the advantages of e-voting.
In the trial areas the turnout for the 2002 UK local elections was,
on the whole, no higher than in previous years.
Experience in Florida, and at several local UK authorities, has
shown that e-voting can be slower than manual counting. It can also
be considerably more expensive.
Many observers believe the fundamental problem with e-voting is
that the government appears to be using it to provide a technical
fix to what is essentially a political and social problem.
If voters are disillusioned with politics and politicians, then
giving them the option to vote on the Internet or by mobile phone
is unlikely to make much difference.
E-voting
- May 2002 UK trials considered a success
- Almost 11% of Swindon's electorate voted via the Internet from
home, libraries and council kiosks
- Thirty local authorities ran election pilots: 13 piloted all
postal voting, some with electronic counting; 16 included elements
of e-voting or e-counting; five offered Internet voting; two
offered text messaging via mobile phone.
- More pilots will be held in the 2003 local elections. Source:
Office of the E-Envoy