Digital Life

Matthew Webster

You might have wondered why you couldn’t vote online in the local elections, or perhaps you thought that we should at least be able to vote using a computer in the polling station. Surely either would provide convenient, secure and accurate results?

In fact, the opposite is true. Electronic voting is a dreadful idea which must be resisted at all costs.

First, voting through the internet. If you want to commit voter fraud in the UK today, you’ll need to involve a lot of people, all pretending to be someone else or perhaps risk bribing officials.

Compare that to internet-based voting fraud. The effort involved in changing one person’s vote would be the same as that needed to alter thousands, and you wouldn’t even have to be in the same country to do it. If you doubt me, consider this: a digital marketing firm in Manchester recently demonstrated how easy it is to rig the Government’s petitions site. It planted 72,000 confirmed but entirely fictitious signatures on a Brexit-related petition. It cost them £22 and a few hours’ work; imagine what a determined organisation with time and resources could achieve.

So why not replace ballot papers with computerised voting machines in the polling stations? Because you can’t trust them – ever. How would you know that the software in the machine in the booth is uncorrupted and is recording your vote accurately? They wouldn’t let you check it, even if you knew how. Compare that with the elegant simplicity of the tin ballot box which you can tap and rattle.

Even if the voting machine is honest, how are the votes to be sent to the returning officer without the risk of interference? If transmitted over the internet, anything could happen to them, as they shoot around the world (really). You could transfer the votes to a memory stick and physically take it to the count, but memory sticks can be tinkered with or replaced without leaving a trace. This compares with a simple ballot box that will be rejected if it arrives at the count unsealed.

Then there is the question of anonymity. With a physical ballot, while they know that you did vote, they’ll never know how you voted. By contrast, any computerised voting method will know exactly who has voted for each candidate – and don’t tell me that the information won’t get out sooner or later. All computers leak eventually.

Then there is trust or, rather, the lack of it; in our current system, no one person is trusted. Ballot boxes are opened in public with lots of witnesses and the count takes place the same way. If you introduce computers, you are placing huge trust in anonymous software engineers and hardware manufacturers from who knows where. As the votes are being churned around invisibly in a computer, anyone might be sneaking in and altering them. I’m even against an electronic counting machine for ballot papers; they have all the same vulnerabilities to meddling as any computer.

There is no plan to introduce electronic voting here, but our Government has a relentless desire to move all its activities online – so it may come. I hope not; I keep warning that cybersecurity is in its infancy, and that there are at least as many people with large brains trying to break into computers as there are trying to stop them, but I feel rather like Cassandra. The Netherlands and Germany have tried electronic voting and abandoned it. Estonia, which uses it a lot, has been urged to ditch it by researchers who found that it was easy to rig.

So I urge the UK to stick to tin ballot boxes, bits of paper and a pencil on a string. You know where you are with them.