Touch screen voting machines may “flip” votes to rival candidates. The case has not been fully made for e-voting. Until it is, I think we should proceed with caution in the UK.
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Make the ID cards eID cards, usable online and logging the ID of the holder. Fully test the voting machines. Its all down to quality engineering, but we don’t see govt endorsing that and learning how to manage its deployment. Engineering is a discipline…
Um, no, it’s not all down to engineering. Getting it to add up right is the easy part. The hard part is that ordinary voters must be able to assure themselves that the process is fair.
Trust in voting machines is a much more difficult to assure than trust in the bank payment system, because in the banking system, you can see if it went wrong when you get your credit card bill. With voting – as it stands now – you have to assure yourself that the *process* is all working, which is much more work.
With paper voting, if you want, you can become an election observer and look over the shoulders of the counters to see if they count wrong, or slip something out of their pockets. You can’t do that to a voting machine.
I am a software engineer, and none of the people I know in the industry thing that voting machines are ready. We have much less need for them than they do in the US – there, they may have to vote for for four levels of government, judges, local school boards, referendums on changes to the law, you name it. We have maybe three or four votes to make. We can afford to keep paper voting.
Having said all that, there are some interesting potential ways we could actually *improve* assurance over paper voting. They are summarised in this article in the economist – http://www.economist.com/science/tm/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12455414 – although I think that article emphasises the wrong point somewhat. The advantage of these schemes – if they work – is that a voter can verify, after the election, whether their own personal vote was counted. This is something we’ve never had before. (At least, not at the same time as anonymous voting, which is needed to prevent vote-buying and intimidation).
If we adopt any element of the US system it should be early voting (which we should also make mobile and target in low-turnout areas).
In Ohio this year early votes were all on paper ballots and voters were given the choice on the day of voting on paper instead of on a machine if they so wished. It was highly popular and considerably fewer problems were reported than four years ago.
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