Important Lessons for Vendors of e-Voting Systems

Vienna.
The next session at EDEM 2009 starts with Alexander Leiningen-Westerburg from Siemens, who consequently shifts our attention to the vendors of e-voting services. He notes the very delicate questions around e-voting, and suggests that success or failure of individual implementations affects every vendor in the market. But how much of a market is there, anyway - what are the advantages of e-voting? One promise is an increase in the voter participation, but so far there is little evidence for this. Another is that more expatriots are likely to participate in e-voting (especially in major emigration countries, such as those of eastern Europe), but again, the evidence so far is limited.

That said, there is good evidence for voter participation online; Alexander now runs through some of the statistics of the leaders in the US presidential elections last year - certainly, the better Internet campaigner there did end up winning the election, even if there is no clear evidence of a causal link here. Upcoming elections in Europe may provide interesting test cases here - and this may further heighten politicians' attention to e-democracy and e-voting, too. This still doesn't necessarily translate to e-voting participation, of course. Technological excellence is a prerequisite for, but not necessarily a guarantee of success - and conversely, one small glitch may throw back the e-voting industry by several years.

Further, frameworks of electoral law also need to be considered, of course - not least, universal suffrage. And what about free suffrage - the secrecy of the vote? The vote must be secret and must not be able to be manipulated by technological means; what guarantees does the public have at this point, and do they believe these guarantees? Lack of trust must be considered in any attempt to advocate e-voting systems. Vendors must make sure that the government runs a long-term informations and public relations campaign on the introduction of e-voting; if they are unprepared to do so, the project will fail as too few users users are convinced they can trust the system. This is even more complicated in the context of financial shortcomings, of course; e-voting is not cheap, and is likely to be delayed by the need to cut costs.

The principle that every voter must be able to cast their vote in person is supported in the context of e-voting by the availability of citizens' (ID) cards which can be used for personal authentication online; the roll-out of such cards is a battle yet to be won in many countries, of course. And the equality of all votes is paramount for the roll-out of e-voting; if such systems are sold to countries where the adherence to this principle is doubtful, then this may have major negative repercussions on the public perception of e-voting world-wide. Vendors must exercise great caution, therefore, and cannot make any security concessions because of the budget situation of the customer. If the e-vote fails 'there', the e-voting market 'here' will also be dead for several decades. Vendors must act as transparently as possible, and provide as much information to customers and the public as possible.

Technorati : EDEM 2009, democracy, e-voting, elections, government, security, transparency
Del.icio.us : EDEM 2009, democracy, e-voting, elections, government, security, transparency