Electronic voting is voting that uses electronic means to either aid or handle casting and counting ballots including voting time.
Depending on the particular implementation, e-voting may use standalone electronic voting machines (also called EVM) or computers connected to the Internet (online voting). It may encompass a range of Internet services, from basic transmission of tabulated results to full-function online voting through common connectable household devices. The degree of automation may be limited to marking a paper ballot, or may be a comprehensive system of vote input, vote recording, data encryption and transmission to servers, and consolidation and tabulation of election results.
A e-voting system must perform most of these tasks while complying with a set of standards established by regulatory bodies, and must be aligned with requirements associated with security, accuracy, speed, privacy, auditability, accessibility, data integrity, cost-effectiveness, scalability, anonymity, trustworthiness, and sustainability.
Electronic voting technology can include punched cards, optical scan voting systems and specialized voting kiosks (including self-contained direct-recording electronic voting systems, or DRE). It can also involve transmission of ballots and votes via telephones, private computer networks, or the Internet. The functions of electronic voting depend primarily on what the organizers intend to achieve.
In general, two main types of e-voting can be identified:
e-voting which is physically supervised by representatives of governmental or independent electoral authorities (e.g. electronic voting machines located at polling stations); remote e-voting via the Internet (also called i-voting) where the voter submits their vote electronically to the election authorities, from any location.
Many countries have used electronic voting for at least some elections, including Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. , Brazil is the only country in which all elections are conducted through electronic voting.
Benefits Electronic voting technology intends to speed the counting of ballots, reduce the cost of paying staff to count votes manually and can provide improved accessibility for disabled voters. Also in the long term, expenses are expected to decrease. Results can be reported and published faster. Voters save time and cost by being able to vote independently from their location. This may increase overall voter turnout. The citizen groups benefiting most from electronic elections are the ones living abroad, citizens living in rural areas far away from polling stations and the disabled with mobility impairments.Anwar, N. K. (n.d.). Advantages and Disadvantages of e-Voting: The Estonian Experience. Academia.edu. Retrieved 10 June 2019 from www.academia.edu/35246981/Advantages_and_Disadvantages_of_e-Voting_The_Estonian_ExperienceCook, T. (7 December 2016). How Electronic Voting Works: Pros and Cons vs. paper Voting. MUO. Retrieved 10 June 2019 from https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-electronic-voting-works/
Concerns and improvements
In a 2004 article for OpenDemocracy, security analyst Bruce Schneier claimed that computer security experts at the time were "unanimous on what to do" about concerns regarding electronic voting. "DRE machines must have voter-verifiable paper audit trails," he said, and "software used on DRE machines must be open to public scrutiny"Schneier, Bruce (September 2004), What's wrong with electronic voting machines? to ensure the accuracy of the voting system. Verifiable ballots are necessary because computers can and do malfunction and because voting machines can be compromised.
Concerns regarding security lapses in aging voting machines came to a head shortly before and during the 2016 United States presidential election. Cases were reported at the time of machines making unpredictable, inconsistent errors. The expert consensus centered on three primary solutions: the openness of a system to public examination from outside experts, the creation of an authenticable paper record of votes cast, and a chain of custody for records.
Several major reforms took place after the 2016 U.S. election, including the widespread adoption of voting machines that produce voter-verified paper audit trails (VVPATs). These paper records allow election officials to conduct audits and recounts, significantly enhancing transparency and security. Congress provided $380 million in funding through the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018 under the framework of the Help America Vote Act to replace old machines with more secure models with modern cybersecurity protections. By 2020, 93% of U.S. votes had a paper record, and only 0.5 percent of jurisdictions reported using electronic voting machines without paper audit trails. This reduced the risk of undetected cyber interference or machine malfunction by enabling verification through physical ballots.
In collaboration with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and other organizations, election officials also took steps to harden voting systems against potential cyberattacks. This included training election officials, sharing threat intelligence, and establishing secure systems for vote transmission and counting.
In addition to concerns about electoral fraud and auditability, electronic voting has been criticized as unnecessary and expensive to introduce. While countries like India continue to use electronic voting, several countries have cancelled e-voting systems or decided against a large-scale rollout, notably the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and the United Kingdom due to issues in reliability or transparency of EVMs.
Moreover, people without internet or the skills to use it are excluded from the service. The so-called digital divide describes the gap between those who have access to the internet and those who do not. Depending on the country or even regions in a country the gap differs. This concern is expected to become less important in future since the number of internet users tends to increase.
Expenses for the installation of an electronic voting system are high. For some governments they may be too high so that they do not invest. This aspect is even more important if it is not sure whether electronic voting is a long-term solution.
New South Wales 2021 iVote failures During the 2021 NSW Local Government Elections the online voting system "iVote" had technical issues that caused some access problems for some voters. Analysis done of these failures indicated a significant chance of the outages having impacted on the electoral results for the final positions. In the Kempsey ward, where the margin between the last elected and first non-elected candidates was only 69 votes, the electoral commission determined that the outage caused a 60% chance that the wrong final candidate was elected. Singleton had a 40% chance of having elected the wrong councillor, Shellharbour was a 7% chance and two other races were impacted by a sub-1% chance of having elected the wrong candidate. The NSW Supreme Court ordered the elections in Kempsey, Singleton and Shellharbour Ward A to be re-run. In the 2022 Kempsey re-vote the highest placed non-elected candidate from 2021, Dean Saul, was instead one of the first councillors elected. This failure caused the NSW Government to suspend the iVote system from use in the 2023 New South Wales state election.
Types of system
Electronic voting machines
Electronic voting systems for electorates have been in use since the 1960s when punched card systems debuted. Their first widespread use was in the US where 7 counties switched to this method for the 1964 presidential election.Saltman, Roy (NBS), EFFECTIVE USE OF COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY IN VOTE-TALLYING . NIST. The newer optical scan voting systems allow a computer to count a voter's mark on a ballot. DRE voting machines which collect and tabulate votes in a single machine, are used by all voters in all elections in Brazil and India, and also on a large scale in Venezuela and the United States. They have been used on a large scale in the Netherlands but have been decommissioned after public concerns. In Brazil, the use of DRE voting machines has been associated with a decrease in error-ridden and uncounted votes, promoting a larger enfranchisement of mainly less educated people in the electoral process, shifting government spending toward public healthcare, particularly beneficial to the poor.
Paper-based electronic voting system
Paper-based voting systems originated as a system where votes are cast and counted by hand, using paper ballots. With the advent of electronic tabulation came systems where paper cards or sheets could be marked by hand, but counted electronically. These systems included punched card voting, marksense and later digital pen voting systems.
These systems can include a ballot marking device or electronic ballot marker that allows voters to make their selections using an electronic input device, usually a touch screen system similar to a DRE. Systems including a ballot marking device can incorporate different forms of assistive technology. In 2004, Open Voting Consortium demonstrated the 'Dechert Design', a General Public License open source paper ballot printing system with open source bar codes on each ballot.
Direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting system
A direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machine records votes by means of a ballot display provided with mechanical or electro-optical components that can be activated by the voter (typically buttons or a touchscreen); that processes data with computer software; and that records voting data and ballot images in memory components. After the election it produces a tabulation of the voting data stored in a removable memory component and as a printed copy. The system may also provide a means for transmitting individual ballots or vote totals to a central location for consolidating and reporting results from precincts at the central location. These systems use a precinct count method that tabulates ballots at the polling place. They typically tabulate ballots as they are cast and print the results after the close of polling.
In 2002, in the United States, the Help America Vote Act mandated that one handicapped accessible voting system be provided per polling place, which most jurisdictions have chosen to satisfy with the use of DRE voting machines, some switching entirely over to DRE. In 2004, 28.9% of the registered voters in the United States used some type of direct recording electronic voting system, up from 7.7% in 1996.