Online Voting: The Last Frontier of Digitalization?
What has not been digitalized yet? Online shopping is becoming more popular and electronic books are common these days. In the business field, there are many buzz words such as “edtech”, ”fintech”, ”insurtech”, etc. which means that introducing new technology is the current trend. But some claim that digitalizing everything has a lot of risks. For example, in 2013, Yahoo was hacked and resulted in a dismal leakage of many customer’s information. Similarly, voting is one of the most discussed areas for digitalization because of its risks. It is true that some advanced countries have already started internet voting, but there are still many restrictions. As our guest speaker, Richard Rogers, the Chief Technology Officer in the state of California, said in his lecture, the installation of an online system with robust security is not cost-efficient because we just have elections every two years. [1] In this blog, I’m going to show that there are two sides of electronic voting.
Some countries have already installed online voting systems and have been successful. Estonia, a small country in northern Europe, is one of the frontier countries. They started an e-voting project in 2003 and implemented it for the first time in 2004. [2] And it worked well. They use their national ID cards with PIN codes like credit cards for voting, which makes it more secure because they can confirm the identification of individuals. In 2005, only 1.9% people of the population vote though the Internet, but it has been getting so popular that the rate reached to over 30% in the most recent parliament election. [3] Needless to say, Estonia has been making efforts to maintain the security of internet voting. In conjunction with a private company, the Estonian government built a quite strong security system from scratch. [3]
On the other hand, some still complain that online voting contains too many risks. David Dill, the professor at Stanford Computer Science, strongly disagrees with this new politech system. [4] In the article, he said “Computers are very complicated things and there’s no way with any reasonable amount of resources that you can guarantee that the software and hardware are bug-free and that they haven’t been maliciously attacked.”[4] Basically, this idea explains why there are so many people against e-voting. They are afraid that security systems will never be perfect and can be hacked by malicious people seeking fraud.
As mentioned above, there are two opposite opinions regarding online voting. Personally, I’m for this new technology. Especially, in my country, Japan, has a serious rate of decrease in voting these days. Even though we have an increasingly aging society, many young people don’t go voting because it’s troublesome, resulting in the dominance of elderly people’s opinions and favors. Their ideas tend to be shortsighted since they don’t live that long. E-voting can be a method for encouraging younger generations to vote because they are open to new technology. Also, thanks to block chain, I believe that the risks surrounding internet voting will be solved in the near future. Some say “By casting votes as transactions, we can create a blockchain which keeps track of the tallies of the votes”. [5] No one is certain whether this new technology can eliminate all the risks or not. But I’m sure that if there is a strong demand for online voting, the necessary technological changes will come true someday.
[Sources]
[1] Richard Rogers, the guest speaker at MS&E 238 on 13/7/2018
[2] http://aceproject.org/ace-en/focus/e-voting/countries
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39955468
[4] https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/david-dill-why-online-voting-danger-democracy
[5] https://followmyvote.com/online-voting-technology/blockchain-technology/
[6] https://www.govinfosecurity.com/interviews/online-voting-security-vs-expediency-i-2489
