What do we want from e-Voting? - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

What do we want from e-Voting?

Stuart Anderson

School of Informatics

e-voting

• Accuracy: Do we choose individual criteria or more socialised criteria?
• Confidentiality: we all know the current system isn’t – how hard should it be to discover how an individual (or group) voted?
• Availability: given US experience it seems like “rationing” of timeslots could be a real issue.
• From a dependability perspective the scope of the system we consider is critical and getting requirements right at that level:
• We want e-voting to provide part of the mechanism to implement democracy.
• Democracy: "[T]he democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote." Schumpeter (1942)

e-voting

• The Power Enquiry, published today:
• http://www.powerinquiry.org/
• How can democracy survive when we feel politicians don’t listen?
• How can politics be revived when fewer and fewer of us support political parties?
• How can voting be encouraged if millions see elections as a charade?
• Elections Minister Harriet Harman will introduce measures to combat voting fraud ahead of local elections next May.
• ballot papers with security marks and barcodes to enable quick security checks.
• In 2004 the electoral commissioner said postal voting was "wide open to fraud".
• Six Labour councillors in Birmingham stepped down after Sir Richard Mawrey found evidence of postal ballot abuse that he said would disgrace a "banana republic".

e-voting

• Schumpeter again: … by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote.
• It needs to be a struggle, so e-voting shouldn’t be too easy.
• Emphasis is often on issues like:
• Large scale fraud of ballot papers
• Coercion at the point of voting
• Rationing access to voting: registration, supply of machines, bandwidth etc.
• Maybe a bigger hazard is making it easy enough for unengaged people to vote.

e-voting

• Traditionally high level of voter participation pre 1998, around 85%, 1998 – 77% and dropping.
• Ny Demokrati, or New Democracy (abbreviated Nyd), was a Swedish right-wing political party represented in the Riksdag between 1991 and 1994.
• Campaigned for election to the national parliament on an agenda of populism, xenophobia, racism and neoliberal economic policy.
• Opinion polls showed the party getting more than 10 % support.
• On the election day, it received 6 % of the national vote.
• Posed a serious problem in a PR environment.
• Many in Sweden felt it presaged growing youth disillusionment with democracy.
• Swedes can vote very easily – long voting period, voting at the post office, …

e-voting

• Too many politicians see easing the voting process as a way of “fixing” democracy.
• E-voting is seen as an essential tool
• Many potentially ignored properties of e-voting system may be essential if we are to maintain some kind of stability in the competitive struggle for votes.

e-voting