Experimenting With Democracy

Democracy faces a major threat. If preventative action is not taken, the very basis of our system of government could be destroyed, handing power to a small number of unelected, unaccountable individuals. No, I'm not talking about the threat of international terrorism. Instead I refer to ill considered experiments with the voting system itself.

At the moment, Britain is engaged in one of the biggest experiments ever conducted with our voting system. Fourteen million people are being forced to vote in both local and European elections via the post. There have already been serious problems. Ballot papers had to be reprinted. Many were not delivered to the Royal Mail on time. At least one council has resorted to hand delivery. Time alone will tell how many ballots are lost or delivered late.

Then there's the ballot paper itself. Ready? Voters must get someone they know to sign a witness statement that they are the person named. They then vote - local elections are first past the post, and to take Manchester as an example, voters can vote for up to three candidates. Meanwhile European elections are proportional representation, so voters get one vote - for a party, not a candidate - and the actual person elected is chosen from lists. Both ballot papers go inside one envelope, folded so that the barcode is visible, and then that envelope and the witness statement go in another envelope, which the voter posts. Confused? I hope not - make a mistake, and your vote isn't valid. And unlike the polling booth, if you have a query, there is no one nearby to ask.

Confusion and accidental disenfranchisement are the least of the problems though. How is anyone going to confirm that fourteen million witness statements are accurate? And even where a witness statement is accurate, that does not guarantee that the person actually cast the votes counted. There is already evidence from earlier trials that suggests that any increase in voter turnout was down to people using other people's ballot papers. The intention of increasing participation in democracy is laudable, but at the moment postal voting cannot provide a guarantee that the person casting the vote is actually entitled to do so. Unless a postal voting system can be developed to deliver a guarantee that's at least as strong as that provided at the polling booth, postal voting is a non-starter.

Still, at least our little experiments with the voting process are saner than those in America. The latest disaster to visit America (and, I should add, other countries round the world) is electronic voting. It seems such a nice idea. Connect some specially designed computers together, automate the whole voting process. Unfortunately, electronic voting, as implemented by Diebold and their ilk, has two major problems. Firstly, no parallel mechanism exists to record the votes cast. Secondly, there is no means to confirm that the machines accurately tabulate the votes cast.

Let me address the second issue first. In the normal process we follow in this country, I (and indeed anyone else who bothers) can examine how the process is designed to work. We can consider and discuss the details, and have the option of protesting (including to the courts) and problems that we may uncover. Representatives of the candidates are expressly invited to the count for this exact reason. The mechanism of voting is open, and therefore can be made robust through scrutiny. However, electronic voting is not. Under the guise of "commercial confidentiality" the workings of the computers are hidden from public scrutiny. We have therefore no way of knowing how the mechanism of voting works. We have some idea how it should work, but that is a different issue entirely. Quite simply, if - through error or malice - a computer assigns one percent of votes for one party to another, this would have an enormous effect on many elections, yet would not produce a result sufficiently different from opinion polls to cause comment.

This is not a minor issue. I'm a software engineer by trade. I can look at code, and work out whether it will work as it should or not. There are, world-wide, millions of people with similar skills to me. If my country were to adopt electronic voting, I would expect that the code would be available for inspection, not just to me, but to any person who feels they are competent to comment on it. In computing terms, an electronic voting system is straight forward to code. There is unlikely to be anything within such a system with any significant commercial value. Indeed, there should be nothing. Established mechanisms exist for every part of the system, which would probably be more robust, and certainly better tested, than anything novel enough to be commercially sensitive. Only by allowing public scrutiny of the source code and hardware specifications of all parts of an electronic voting mechanism can any value be placed on the results generated by such a system.

One other lesson needs to be taken to heart, one that any computing professional should be able to teach you. Computers don't always work. They are not infallible. Data gets corrupted. Bugs surface in the best checked code. Now the chances are that in most elections, the occasional computer error will not matter. After being subjected to public scrutiny, errors should be rare. However, in a close election, the returning officer needs to be able to confirm the results by some other means. Essentially this means that after the voter has voted, a paper copy should be printed out, checked by the voter, and then stored securely. If that sounds a lot like a traditional ballot box system, there is a reason for this. Should there be doubt about the result of a new electoral system, reverting to a tried and trusted alternative is simply sensible.

Democracy is a fragile, valuable asset. Poorly thought out and executed experiments must not be allowed to remove our ability to fairly choose our own government. Any new system must be held up to the yard stick of the ballot box. Any system which is more open to abuse is simply unacceptable.

Graham Robinson. 2nd June 2004.

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