Voters sent away, accusations of fraud - time to look again at e-voting?

Growing suspicion about the extent of possible voting fraud in yesterday's Election and the shocking scenes of voters being turned away from some polling stations has sparked debate about the possible use of more secure identification and possible even e-voting as ways to curb it.

Though proof is thin on the ground, claims of improper postal voting in particular have gripped some sections of the press in these last few days, with around 50 or so nationally so far. The Metropolitan Police has confirmed 28 allegations regarding irregularity have been made in London alone with five under active investigation (four in Tower Hamlets and one in Ealing), while other London Boroughs, including Lambeth, Camden and Redbridge are also having claims “assessed”.

Attempts made prior to the campaigns starting to improve security, with a signature and a date of birth now being mandatory for the first time for anyone applying to vote this way, may actually have backfired somewhat. Councils are having to check votes in a short (11 day) period between the deadline to send in applications and polling day in a new way and some observers worry that move in itself has made the admin of checking such votes that much more cumbersome. As Peter Stanyon, chairman of the Association of Electoral Administrators said, "Councils will have put the systems in place to cope with the work, but it is still a massive task."

The sheer scale of the amount of postal voting is also an issue; some local authorities report postal voting enquiries up by 60%. This at least potentially means results of the Election (which is being held not just for Parliament but for many local councils in London and England, too) might not all be properly recorded until late on Friday - or even into next week.

The rise in postal voting interest and related problems has so concerned The Electoral Commission it has urged Westminster to reconsider the entire current Parliamentary elections timetable. But the Commission has more on its plate following scenes at a number of polling stations around the country where lines of prospective voters were turned away at 10pm after queuing for hours to get in and cast their votes. Some polling stations were understaffed. One simply ran out of ballot papers despite knowing the number of eligible voters on the electoral roll. 

“This is a significant concern. They will have to answer to us and they will have to answer to the local voters. They should have put extra staff on and got extra ballot papers if they were running out," said Jenny Watson, the chairman of the Electoral Commission. “It’s largely a legacy of the Victorian era. It’s not sensible to have a system that was designed when five million people were eligible to vote.”

The alternatives

Combined with complaints that some voters have still not had their forms despite applying within the allowed time and the fact some ex-pats were told the new system meant it was more realistic in the given timeframe to give up and register a proxy vote, we need a better way of letting people vote 'remotely'. Could this be the last major election where post was not the only such option available?

The obvious alternative would be e-voting, if it could be set up in a way that satisfied the manifold security and identity management concerns voters and the state still rightly have of it.

All e-voting really means is a range of technologies from using voting machines at polling stations (as they have done in the US for decades) to voting from home by phone, text message or over the web. Fans say it should drive up voter participation as it would be easier to cast your vote, especially among the digital native/Gen Y cohort, could fold into a mobile or web based information network linking to, say, manifestos and so on. There could also be benefits in accuracy and speed of counting.

There is no denying voters say they are interested in such an option. But just as many commentators – and more importantly, relevant authorities - dislike e-voting as being even more open to possible fraud than things like postal ballots as on a computer and hence, open to being hacked.

The few pilots that have been attempted in the UK on this from 2000 to 2007 failed to resolve that fundamental problem, and even alas threw up some more, such as too many errors in information displayed to the public, annoying technology glitches and manifold security gaps – from confusing encryption to weak sign-on, according to a major audit of the trials by the Open Rights Group, which concluded, in a somewhat damning way for the e-voting community:

“E-voting is a ‘black box system’, where the mechanisms for recording and tabulating the vote are hidden from the voter. This makes public scrutiny impossible, and leaves statutory elections open to error and fraud. The Government has prioritised the introduction of e-voting because of the perceived convenience of new technologies, ignoring other vital considerations such as confidence and trust in the electoral system. [We] consider that the problems observed and difficulties scrutinising results delivered by e-counting systems bring their suitability for statutory elections into question.”

And the verdict so far is

The verdict is that e-voting just hasn't won enough backing, basically. The Electoral Commission, which runs elections in the UK (both political and no, e.g. union ballots), has gone on record that, “There are significant security, transparency and cost-effectiveness issues that need to be addressed before any further consideration is given to introducing e-voting,” while the Electoral Reform Society has also gone on record saying it can't be used until the basic issues are fixed.

“The use of e-voting technologies was most recently piloted in 2007 and while local authorities successfully delivered the pilots, an independent evaluation recommended that more work take place to address a range of electoral concerns including security, testing and quality assurance right through to increasing knowledge and transparency among voters regarding the use of these new technologies,” commented Douglas Stewart, senior manager and public sector democracy specialist in Deloitte’s information and technology risk team.

“However, more fundamentally, the building blocks of any voting system, whether it be paper based or electronic, is the Electoral Register. 21st century e-voting technologies should not be imposed on an electoral registration system that essentially has Victorian foundations. The electoral modernisation legislation recently passed, but yet to take effect, will help provide a more modern, stable and secure electoral registration system which may, over time, support the roll out of e-voting technologies.”

It may be that long as well before electronic counting systems (remember all that 'hanging chad' in the US 2000 Bush-Gore elections?) replace all those lines of council staff tallying up paper slips in front of anxious candidates, too.

So we will just have to muddle along for a while longer with the system we have, it seems, until things like e- or m-voting get fixed. But the pressure to change the system is growing as we start realising that the Mother of Parliaments may not have it all right.

Thus for the first time ever a Commonwealth election group has come to observe the 2010 Election – which will make it doubly embarrassing if any irregularities arise. And strikingly, some of the African and Asian representatives have already expressed concern people can be given ballot papers without being required to produce any form of photo ID.

They may have other useful things to say to us – or as a representative of this group told the media this week, “For far too long, election observation has been a one-way street.

“Given how much effort has gone into designing strong democratic systems and electoral processes in many developing Commonwealth countries, Britain has much to learn from the rest of the world. I hope our observers will contribute to and inform the debate on electoral reform in the UK."