Pre-Voting Stage
Registering voters
Technology makes it possible to register as a voter online. This can increase participation, making elections fairer by making more people's opinion count. Further it could reduce the number of people needed to man voter registration counters. But people would still be needed to verify the information and documents submitted by applicants. But this could also make fraud voter registration easier because faking digital copies of id documents may be easier online.Maintaining records of registered voters
I was unable to easily any historical documentation on the internet about how voter records were maintained before digital era. But I think it is a safe bet that there was an overlap era where
- Voter reqistration & records were the norm (eg Jim Crow laws in early 1900s in USA.
- No common computers.
- Voter records maintained in paper files & registers, written by pens or typewriters, maybe even printing press.
- Voter record transparency was mandated.
Voting Stage
Automation in Voting Stage, i.e. in steps 3 to 9 of Voting Process we saw above is exactly where major disasters strike upon principles of election integrity. This is even more so in electronic automation compared to mechanical automation.
That's the era we can meaningfully compare with current era of digitized records and similar legal requirements
Paper voter list record deletions or modifications would need cancellation marks, physical disposals, rewrites, reprints, etc. Due to such physical observable trails, old fashioned paper based voter list maintenance fraud may be found out more easily. Digital records on the other hand would be easier to delete or modify fraudulently without leaving a trace. Voters can also be bulk-targeted for deletion by suitable criteria using basic database queries or advanced big data machine learning techniques. But on the other hand transparency can also be more robust with digital records because public can easily take and keep copies of voter lists. Thus arbitrary deletions and modifications can be easily detected by comparison. The comparisons and detection could be automated by computer programs. As a result genuine voters don't get deprived, and fairness in election is promoted.
But such digital voter records accessed by public are fluid. They can be very easily copied, transmitted, changed in formats, shared around in bulk. This was not possible for paper records in the past which needed hand-copying, distribution of printed copies, photocopying, etc. So the paper records of the past were not likely to be used for purpose other than electoral process scrutiny, especially because even scanners & optical character recognition (OCR) was not too developed. But now data is a big industry, data is the new oil, and voter data is most precious as it could be used by evil geniuses to mess with free and fair election itself, hijacking fates of whole nations. In fact claims are being made that use of voter rolls data combined with internet activity and other details of voter was used to target voters and influence the Brexit vote and 2016 US Presidential Elections 24
Yet another problem is when private contractors are involved in maintaining voter records. Their format of data may be propreitary and hinder voter record transparency. This can be solved by imposing condition on contractors of course.
On the whole, voter record digitization can help increase transparency and hence fairness in election by making it easier for public to have access to the voter records and be vigilant about its correct maintenance BUT reduces privacy and hence freeness in elections especially in era of rising evil big data surveillance and control.
However my gut feel is, privacy risks in voter record digitization can be overcome by thoughtful legal and tech safeguards and particularly limiting the kind of details publicly available in data. What are these exact measures I have not applied thought to, because voter record digitization does not necessarily destroy election integrity in one big sweep. But voting automation by EVMs is different horror story altogether as we see next.
The first victim is transparency. There is some damage to transparency even in mechanical voting machines, but even then, all the machine spare parts can be watched, either while assembled & working or in disassembled state. So we can be reasonably sure of what the machine is doing or how, especially by direct comparison with schematic diagrams and manuals. So although voting no longer remains transparent to layman, it is still reasonably transparent to experts.
But when it comes to electronics, transparency gets totally destroyed. There is hardly anything humans can observe directly. Electronics is either just hardware or hardware+software, both of which are absolutely incompatible with principle of transparency. Anything that you CAN observe is itself made visible to you through display or output devices, which are run by hardware and software. So if any part of it is fooling you, you just cannot know. In fact, not just layman, but even experts cannot really check and guarantee that a given-hardware or software is doing exactly what it claims to do, or has any intended malicious backdoors and attacks or just unintended bugs which can be devastating for something as critical as democracy. All this is made worse when Election Management Bodies like Election Commission of India don't even allow basic examination of the EVM hardware & software under sham excuses like intellectual property or security by obscurity.
Are you sceptical about my claim that there can be absolutely no transparency in electronic voting? I do intend to convince you, and in fact started to give simple detailed explanation that anyone even without electronics background knowledge can understand. But it kept balooning beyond reasonable size for this essay which is mainly about basics principles of genuine elections in democracy, not about lessons electronics. But we will definitely take electronics as well as transparency problem of electronics in future essay or essays.
But hey that doesn't mean you must simply take my word for it! The issue of lack of transparency in electronic voting machines came up in the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. They examined it in detail and declared the electronic voting machines to be unconstitutional because of lack of transparency 2526. Yes the court did say that electronic voting machine use is not prevented if constitutional requirements of transparency are met, for example, by recodring votes in a way other than electronic storage too. Thankfully Germany has not tried to push for such means after court order. They simply stopped using EVMs. But other nations are trying out things like 'voter verified paper audit trails (VVPATs)' for elctronic voting. And Election Commission of India seems to be leaning towards that 'solution' too. But as we will see later, even those VVPATs a complete sham and don't enhance transparency or integrity of elections.
Bottomline is, electronic voting is a complete disaster for transparency. Neither normal public scrutineers nor experts can reliably scrutinize what the electronic voting machine is really doing. Hence without anyone being able to easily detect, it could be not doing something it is supposed to do as well as doing something it is not supposed to do. This can be by deliberate backdoors or unintended bugs in hardware or software or both.
This can cause mayhem at every step of voting which uses electronics, destroying free & fair, acountable and transparent elections in every way. I am going to tell you all about it in simple yet detailed way in many subsequent essays on this website.
What if I told you electronic voting takes all meaningfullness away from the important step of assuring zero votes before voting begins, thus killing fair vote?
What if I told you electronic verification of voter identity on voting day can make it a child's play to prevent a voter from voting even if their name is clearly on the list, and blame it on 'technology glitches', thus again killing fair vote?
What if I told you that poll list (list of voters who actually voted or polled, participation list) prepared electronically can be faked to match fake vote counts,thus making accountability and fraud detection caross these steps impossible?
What if I told you that using electronics both for voter identification and marking/recording vote can totally destroy secret ballot and hence free elections?
What if I told you marking intended candidate for vote electronically could actually fool voters and mark their vote for someone candidate instead of the one they intended to mark? What if I told you that whether the vote is marked electronically or non-electronically, recording the marked vote by electronics could again fool the voters, give their vote to some other candidate, while giving them a false indicator that their vote went to the correct candidate? Total disaster on transparency and fair vote!
What if I told you even counting and tabling of votes electronically, whether they were marked and recorded electronically or non-electronically, can completely sabotage election result integrity & people's will?
What if I told you that digitization across every stage of voting allows rigging and faking of records across all the stages consistent with each other? So then, even end to end audit of all records will not be able to reveal massive election frauds!
What if I told you that all these things I tell aren't just conceptual, aren't just theory? What if I told you occurances like these have been documented in elections of many countries which tested or used electronic voting? What if I told you that many of these countries wisely discarded electronic voting after such experiences?
What if I told you that in countries which have foolishly continued electronic voting, especially nationally, the 'elected' leaders are acting like dictatorial thugs, causing economic mayhem, massive protests, civil war situations and even building up to international war type situations?