Innovation in Software

It would appear, rather controversially, that whilst just a year ago the Government said there was no interest in introducing e-Voting to the UK at all, the Department for Constitutional Affairs has invited councils to submit proposals anyway.

Proposals from councils are due in for the 17th November, which would suggest those planning to go ahead have probably already had preliminary discussions with software suppliers. The benefits the DCA say they are keen to see promoted in the pilots for e-Voting include:

• the system may assist users to avoid mistakes and prevent them inadvertently spoiling their ballot papers; This could be particularly useful where elections are combined and with complex ballots.

As the pilot is for a local election, I’m not entirely convinced ‘complex ballots’ will be around. In addition, most HCI experiments with e-Voting systems to date have shown that many computer interfaces are actually more confusing than a list of party symbols, names, party names, and a box in which to draw an ‘X’. There is even some cases where Diebold appear to have been implicated in making an interface deliberately complicated.

Imagine the following:

“Do you wish to vote for X or choose somebody else?”, options “Yes”/”No”/”Cancel”. It’s subtle, but a lot of people who fear having made a mistake would at this point get confused.

• the system may be used to link to the elector to candidate information to ensure they have the opportunity to update themselves on candidates and policies at the time of voting;

This is extremely dangerous. The potential for a HCI issue here is massive, and we have laws/rules preventing campaigning within certain distance of a polling station for a reason. I would be very interested in understanding where the DCA is heading with this.

• the systems may be configured to provide options for different languages – something that is obviously beneficial in an increasingly multi-cultural society where English may not be the first language for many people entitled to vote in elections;

This, I conceed is a major benefit of e-Voting systems. However, in areas where there is an expected high turnout of non-English speaking voters, I wonder why we aren’t providing translated ballot papers already. I also wonder how this fits in with the current Government policy of encouraging all citizens (and therefore all people entitled to vote) to be able to speak English. That relates in turn to how a voter who can not speak English well enough to vote could understand the campaign and debate. Shouldn’t this be a broader issue discussed within society before we try fixing it with magic flashing boxes?

• the systems may be configured to accommodate special needs for people with disabilities – this may enable many people who have previously been unable to vote in private, in person at a polling station to do so;

Again, massive potential for a HCI error here. Getting disabled access to IT equipment right is notoriously difficult. I am also not convinced that the considerable expense of rolling out an e-Voting system sophisticated enough to help disabled voters could be justified by providing a benefit to just a small percentage of the population. What’s more, I’m pretty sure that with some thinking it would be possible to provide that percentage of the population a means to a private vote without that level of expense. Would it really be that difficult to provide ballot papers with braille?

• e-voting allows quicker tabulation of votes cast and links with e-counting to produce a result more quickly. This could be of particular benefit in mitigating the increased time that is likely to be spent on processing postal votes as a consequence of signature checking and which may cause counts to be delayed to the day following polling day.

This is the main reason touted for e-Voting across the globe. Feels compelling, but you have to ask yourself which is more important: getting the vote right, or getting it quick? The main criticism of e-Voting is the ease with which it is possible to commit widescale voting fraud. Diebold machines are reported as having an easy way to completely change the number of votes cast after the vote, so what does it matter if the count is quick if it’s thought that it could easily be compeltely made up?

• e-voting may have a positive environmental impact by reducing the need for paper. There are however other factors that need to be considered to identify whether there is an overall benefit in this regard.

Using recycled paper and then recycling cast ballots after the statutory time they need to be retained would be more environmentally friendly. e-Voting systems are composed of horrible toxic chemicals – the contents of a hard-drive would make you scream – that are difficult to recycle, and they of course require electricity to operate on. Paper doesn’t.

• the electronic storage and management of data may improve the contingency arrangements available to electoral staff.

Direct electronic storage and management of the data are actually completely open to abuse. Did you know that if you store data on a CD-R, it is reckoned to start corrupting at a bit level within just four years? Paper records last 100 years or more – there is no electronic medium that can get close to that currently.

The report also suggests pilots for ‘remote e-Voting’ via the Internet or phone. It shouldn’t take a genius to realise that this is open to massive, wide-scale fraud and attack, far greater even than with postal voting. If any council, anywhere, goes down that route, I’m afraid we have reached a point where we no longer effectively live in a democracy, but rather one where the person with the most resources available to cheat will be able to do so for less money than ever before. Voting is not like using a credit card to buy a book, or to vote on Big Brother – the mechanisms are too different to make them comparable.

Anybody who thinks that Internet voting has a future, should consider why the developers behind GNU.FREE decided to stop production in 2002:

’From my experience of designing and developing GNU.FREE over the past three years it has become clear that creating an Internet Voting system sufficiently secure, reliable and anonymous is extremely difficult, if not impossible. As Bruce Schneier points out “a secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers.“‘

When developers, backed up by Bruce Schneier point out that you’re against the wall on this one, you should probably take notice.

It might seem strange that as somebody who touts innovation and technological development, I am posting an article ripping e-Voting to pieces. I understand the benefits the DCA is looking for, but over the last decade I have seen serious problems with this technology and feel that it is therefore my duty as somebody who understands those problems at a software level to point them out to the electorate and the officers within councils responsible for overseeing these votes.

It’s important if we go down this road that I and others who write systems like this explain to all concerned what those problems are, what the risks are, how to counter them, how to reduce them, how to avoid them.

I’ve already sent an e-mail to my local Electoral Services Unit to ask them if they have made a decision to run a pilot, if so with which suppliers, and if they would like me to come in freely and explain what problems they might face. I suspect the answer to the last offer will be a firm ‘no’, but I’ll keep you posted.