The future of e-voting
Last week researchers from Princeton University demonstrated that Diebold voting machines could easily be hacked into in less than four minutes.
The Diebold voting machines were designed to avoid a repetition of the 2000 U.S. presidential election which demonstrated that current election results are an approximation, at best, with unacceptable error margins in a deeply polarized country. It is likely that the negative publicity surrounding these devices will delay the adoption of a technology that could have helped to rebuild the faith of the public in the vote counting process. This is too bad, but I am sure that everyone agrees that it is better to continue using manual counting than implement a notoriously flawed technology.
However, I am sure that many, including myself, would like to see more progress in the area of e-voting, not because we want better counting but because we want a deeper, richer democracy.
In most countries, voters go to the polls only once every couple of years. Between elections we trust our representatives to make the right choices. That is obviously a big mistake. During a term there are many decisions that are just too important to leave to the good judgement of politicians. In countries like Switzerland there are referendums almost once every two weeks, and the people can overturn a decision made by the government quite rapidly. That is what I would like to see happening in larger countries where it is currently quite difficult to implement such a direct democracy model because of cost and logistics issues.
The promise of the Internet has always been the elimination of middlemen. We have seen this happening in the travel, recording, and computer industry (Dell for instance pioneered the direct sales model). Why not in politics?
Getting rid of politicians may not be a good idea, after all we will probably need leaders with ideals to set the political agenda, but we need to reduce their power. This won’t be easy though. It is likely that hey will quickly point out that for an election to be fair, the vote must be both secret and free. How can we guarantee that if people vote at home? They could be compelled to vote in a certain way by their spouse, boss or a special interest group. It is a difficult problem but with the technology available to us (digital certificates and biometrics) we should start the debate.