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Policy

Elections electrified: the end of the paper ballot?

By Robin Hicks | 19 May 2009

Election fever is gripping Asia, from India to Indonesia. And the elections are increasingly going digital. Why is electronic voting gradually displacing the paper ballot? Robin Hicks sizes up the candidates

November‘s US Presidential elections were the most sophisticated yet in their embrace of technology to reach voters. Books will be written about Barack Obama’s canny use of social networks, online profiling and text messaging to win support. But in one way they took a step backwards: how America voted.

Not in a political sense, of course (unless you are a Republican). Rather the technology used to cast and count votes. At the 2004 elections, almost one third of American voters used direct recording electronic voting systems, or DRE. These systems allow voters to make their choices using a bank of buttons or a touch-screen. Votes are recorded on to a memory card, which is later taken by election officials to a central location for counting – like paper ballots in the past.

But in the recent elections, many states had reverted to the paper-based system. State governments had worried that DRE machines could be tampered with inside the factory and were vulnerable to hackers outside it. In the 2004 elections, questions were raised over the susceptibility of DRE machine-making firm Diebold (now known as Premier Election Solutions) to bugs that cause inaccurate vote counting.

Eyebrows were also raised because of Diebold’s connections to the Bush administration. DRE machines were vigorously tested before the 2008 elections, but they did not get a confidence vote. “Hackers were hired to try to break into the system,” observes Don Adams, the Palo Alto-based Chief Security Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Worldwide, Public Sector, of TIBCO. “It didn’t take them long. So most states reverted to the tried and trusted system – paper.”

Contrast this with India where the world’s largest election is in process – and it is entirely electronic. In fact, Indians have been voting via Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) for almost two decades, before which the paper ballot and rubber stamp system was used. In May 2005, 380 million citizens cast their votes on more than one million electronic machines. This month and next, 714 million people (43 million are first-time voters) are expected at 828,000 polling stations, officiated by 4 million election workers and an extra 2.1 million police.

Incredibly, what used to take three months, can now be done in three days. There is now no need for recounts since there are fewer invalid votes with the electronic system (the number of invalid votes was more than the winning margin between the candidates in every general elections that used the paper system in India). Illiteracy is less of an issue than with the paper ballot system too, as the voter need only press a button. EVMs are lighter and more portable than paper ballot boxes, which cuts the time needed to transport the machines from the polling stations to a counting location. And since they run on 6-volt alkaline batteries, they can be used in areas with no power.

Indian machines are not as complicated as the American ones, and far less expensive (an EVM costs US$200, a DRE US$3000). US machines are loaded with voice-guidance systems, modems and Windows operating systems, while the Indian machines are not much more high-tech than a computer keyboard. Buttons run down one side with a candidate’s name next to each button. The names are written on slips of paper that can be rearranged, so there’s no point rigging the machines at the factory.

The software is embedded onto a microprocessor that cannot be reprogrammed – if an attempt is made to open the EVM, it shuts down automatically. Unlike the US devices, EVMs are not networked, which also reduces their vulnerability to abuse. The machines must be individually carried to a central counting centre, but their basic design means that thousands of machines would have to be corrupted – one by one – to affect the outcome of an election.

“Over the years the electronic voting system has proved its ruggedness and reliability,” says R Chandrashekhar, Additional Secretary, E-governance, Government of India. “It is a simple piece of hardware that has passed all sorts of security tests. There is no need to update the technology for technology’s sake. The more complicated the technology, and the more software is added, the greater the chance of it going wrong.”

For all its claimed advantages, it is unlikely that India’s EVMs will be imported by the US. Partly because they do not offer the versatility needed to cater for a broad range of groups, such as the disabled, in 50 different states each with their own rules (India’s 28 states answer to only one set of rules set by the Election Commission in New Delhi). And also, says one American observer, because it is unlikely that the US would want to import technology it regards as less sophisticated than its own – more reliable or not.

Of course India’s voting machines are not perfect. Madhav Ragam, Director, Government & Education, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Growth Markets Unit, IBM, says that while India does a good job considering the “mind-boggling” scale and complexity of its elections, no voting process is invulnerable. “There is usually a weak point in the system, internal or external, that can be exploited. The technological challenge is how you put the necessary processes and procedures in place to ensure that as little as possible falls through the cracks.”

There is little election officials can do, for instance, if a voting station is besieged by saboteurs. “Booth capturing” cannot be prevented by EVMs, although the machines do slow the assailants down – EVMs are programmed to record only five votes every minute. To alert the Election Commission to attacks on booths, a system is being trialed in Bangalore where election officials are equipped with GPS-enabled mobile phones. If the system is effective, it will be rolled out nationwide.

Booth capturing is not unique to India. It also happens in Indonesia, which is in the throes of parliamentary and presidential elections. It is not unheard of for entire polling stations to be uprooted and carried off, which is hard to police in an archipelago of 17,000 islands. Indonesia’s elections will welcome more than 170 million voters to the polls at least twice this year, on April 9th and July 8th. If none of the 38 parties (in which there are 12,000 candidates to choose from) win a majority in the presidential race, Indonesians will be sent back to the polling booths for a third time.

Indonesia’s elections are mostly paper-based, although the way the ballots are processed and counted has been electronically automated. This presented huge logistical challenges for the world’s third largest democracy. Badan Pusat Statistik, Indonesia’s Bureau of Statistics, wanted to capture (using scanners) and process 80 million registration forms, often in poor condition, in five months for the GeneralElections Commission.

Problems arise, not only around the capture and collection of ballots, but when the information is transferred to central government to be stored and archived. EMC was asked to make this part of the process secure, but there wasn’t enough time to complete the task.

There are no plans, yet, to make Indonesia’s elections entirely electronic - especially since problems with the partially-introduced electronic system have threatened to delay the elections this year. But next year will be the first year that elections are computerised in the Philippines. Here, the saying goes that there are no losersin elections - only winners and those who were cheated.

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) wants to change that. Chairman Jose Melo has said that Pesos 11.3 billion (US$324 million) will go into automating the May 10th 2010 elections. Instead of writing on ballot, Filipino voters will shade the spaces alloted for candidates and the ballots are then inserted into optical mark readers. “The good thing about the scanning and marking system is that there is a paper trail which allows you to do a paper audit – which is not true of some electronic voting systems,” says Lloyd Parata, the Asia Pacific Vice President of Global 360, a business process management provider.

Comelec expects results for all national candidates, from President to the Senators, to be known in two days with the new system. One of the Senators who voted for electronic elections was Dick Gordon. He said: “With automated elections, our people can rely on the fact that their vote will be counted, and that their vote will mean change for the country, then they will stop being cynical.“

But not everyone thinks the same way. “I am not willing to spend even a single centavo on a system which is not tested, which we cannot even describe or define, or a system that we’re not even sure will deliver a clean, honest and fair election,” Senator Francis Escudero told his peers.

But on the whole, Filipino politicians think that full automation under the Precinct Counting Optical Scan (PCOS) will be faster and more accurate, and so reduce instances of fraud and cheating - and so cut the number of complaints from sore losers. The printed ballot features security markings that are fed into a scanner, which records and stores the votes. A tender will go out tomorrow (on May 22nd) First-time voters in India’s elections this year 43m to find a vendor that can supply 80,000 machines for the 2010 elections. Among those in contention is Bharat Electronics, the Indian company that makes EVMs.

Electronic elections are probably the future for most countries. But not all. E-voting was abandoned in Ireland in 2004 after scientists produced evidence that the DRE machines in use were corruptible. In May last year in the Netherlands, e-voting was banned amid fears that the technology was susceptible to eavesdropping, marking a victory for the pressure group Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet (We do not trust voting machines).

While it is clear that just because one system works well in India or the US, it won’t necessarily be adopted in other countries, electronic voting is clearly gaining acceptance in the region as a cost-effective and scalable means of ensuring that every vote is counted – but only once.

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