Prakash Per­sad

In 1892, the me­chan­i­cal lever vot­ing ma­chine was first used in the USA. Mod­ern vot­ing ma­chines are how­ev­er of the elec­tron­ic type. The Gen­er­al Ac­count­ing Of­fice re­port of 2005 not­ed "di­rect record­ing elec­tron­ic sys­tems (DREs) in­clude hard­ware, soft­ware and firmware used to de­fine bal­lots, cast and count votes and main­tain and pro­duce au­dit trail in­for­ma­tion."

The DREs were first in­tro­duced in the decade of the 1970s and they cap­ture votes elec­tron­i­cal­ly with­out the use of pa­per bal­lots. They are sim­i­lar to ATM ma­chines with ei­ther push but­tons or touch screens.

Pro­po­nents of DREs ar­gue that they are se­cure, able to def­i­nite­ly cap­ture the vot­er's choice and are easy to use. A big ad­van­tage is that re­sults are tab­u­lat­ed a lot faster and fur­ther, they are quite ac­ces­si­ble to the dis­abled. Op­po­nents re­spond by say­ing that vot­ing ma­chines give too much pow­er over pub­lic elec­tions to ma­chines/their man­u­fac­tur­ers and agents. Al­so there is the is­sue of the ma­chines be­ing hacked. As is com­mon with any tech­nol­o­gy, there are risks as­so­ci­at­ed with its use. But the moot ques­tion must be this, do the ben­e­fits out­weigh the risks (both re­al and per­ceived)?

DREs are used by all vot­ers in all elec­tions (na­tion­al, state and mu­nic­i­pal) in Brazil and In­dia. It is al­so used on a large scale in Venezuela and the USA. In­dia, with a pop­u­la­tion of some 1.2 bil­lion, would be hard-pressed to use on­ly pa­per bal­lots and one can on­ly imag­ine the size of the time lag be­tween vot­ing and the ver­i­fi­ca­tion and an­nounce­ment of re­sults. In fact, even with the use of vot­ing ma­chines, the elec­tions are done in phas­es. It is well known that the longer the count­ing pe­ri­od, the more like­ly are charges of vote rig­ging.

The pop­u­la­tion of the world's largest democ­ra­cy seem to be quite hap­py with elec­tron­ic vot­ing ma­chines. On the oth­er hand, the sec­ond largest democ­ra­cy seem to be rolling back its us­age. An is­sue raised in the USA has been the so-called "flip­ping" of votes where­by a vote for a can­di­date of one par­ty is reg­is­tered as a vote for the can­di­date of the oth­er par­ty. This is by no means a reg­u­lar oc­cur­rence but one case is enough to cast doubts on the en­tire process.

This is the big prob­lem that faces vot­ing ma­chines. Not every­body, par­tic­u­lar­ly those in the west, seem to quite trust tech­nol­o­gy with their "sa­cred" vot­ing rights. This is cu­ri­ous­ly for they do trust tech­nol­o­gy (to the ex­tent that they use it with ad­e­quate se­cu­ri­ty guar­an­tees) with their mon­ey and per­son­al in­for­ma­tion.

Of course, the reg­u­lar high-pro­file mass hi­jack­ing of elec­tron­ic da­ta re­al­ly does not help the cause of vot­ing ma­chines. But banks and busi­ness­es con­tin­ue to com­put­erise and digi­tise process­es and in­for­ma­tion in spite of hack­ing episodes. Nat­u­ral­ly, se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures are be­ing con­tin­u­ous­ly mon­i­tored and im­proved to min­imise the risk of be­ing hacked. So it would ap­pear, that to over­come the reser­va­tions and ob­jec­tions to DREs, pub­lic con­fi­dence must be built up and sus­tained.

One pos­si­ble path could be the use of In­ter­net vot­ing for spe­cif­ic elec­tions. Coun­tries in which this hap­pens in­clude Cana­da, Es­to­nia and the state of Gu­jarat in In­dia where, in six mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties in 2010, vot­ers were able to cast their votes over the In­ter­net. This was done from their homes or polling sta­tions.

In T&T, blessed to have a plur­al so­ci­ety, com­pris­ing of tribes and the self-right­eous, self- pro­claimed "tribe-less" but cursed by its frac­tious na­ture, con­fi­dence in the tech­nol­o­gy will have to be en­gen­dered. Now, one-man one-vote has, more or less, be­come the norm for choos­ing the lead­er­ship in po­lit­i­cal par­ties. So a log­i­cal start­ing point might be the use of In­ter­net vot­ing in these elec­tions. The num­bers would be small enough for pi­lot tests which might al­low for greater ac­cep­tance in mu­nic­i­pal and na­tion­al elec­tions.