Last year The Star ran an article detailing the merits of online voting. You get the usual benefits: increased turnout, happier constituents, and enhanced convenience. What the article entirely misses, of course, are the security and associated legitimacy issues linked with voting online. An academic blogger, writing before the article, notes that:
‘securing’ the Internet is a Herculean task. It absolutely cannot be regarded as a ‘secure’ development environment, especially when dealing with matters that are highly sensitive to political, technical, and social fault conditions. Such conditions may be worse that a fail condition, on the basis that faults generate fear and concern without a clear indication that something has gone wrong. In the case of an election, a perceived exploitable fault condition threatens to undermine political legitimacy and politically-generated solidarity on grounds that electoral results might be questionable. Thinking back our bridge example, a ‘fail’ might be a bridge collapsing. A ‘fault’ might include cracks spanning the support columns that cause motorists to avoid using the bridge out of fear, even though the cracks do not endanger the bridge’s stability. If ‘faults’ cannot be corrected, then there may be general fear about the validity of an election even if the election is not manipulated. If a ‘fail’ condition occurs but is not detected, then there may be a perception of electoral legitimacy without the election actually being legitimate.
Elections are not something to be trivially tampered with. Heightened conveniences should not trump electoral security and legitimacy. While paper voting is annoying it is a far more ‘secure’ method than online voting mechanisms. It really isn’t too much to ask/expect of people to mail in a vote, go to a polling station, or (quite reasonably) abstain from the process for their own reasons. We should not undermine a foundation of democracy just to make things a little bit more convenient.
Excited Pixels 