Technology has changed many aspects of elections in the last several decades. Components of a democratic system, like campaigning, polling and policymaking, rely more than ever on the effective use of social media and information analysis.
The most notable advantage of using technology is that many crucial political operations and tactics are digitized. In the face of these evolving methods and practices, however, the actual voting process must remain physical. Electronic voting, despite even the best arguments in its favor, is unreliable and risky.
Electronic voting gained popularity with the beginning of the Internet. Since the early 2000s, countries like Estonia, Canada and Switzerland have used electronic voting in elections as a replacement for punch cards used in the previous century to track election data. Today, electronic voting is used primarily in the West for elections at the local and national levels, especially in the European Union, where governments have invested in improving the efficiency of electronic voting and the digital infrastructure that supports it.
While electronic voting is actively promoted as a safe and modern method, it also carries a strategic risk, even with the best security measures in place. On a practical level, software systems designed for online voting are vulnerable to cyberattacks, while machines at voting stations are at risk of tampering and malfunction from exposure to the elements. In either case, electronic systems are vulnerable to intentional or unintentional damage that can affect election results far more severely than paper ballots.
Electronic voting also poses a strategic risk due to vulnerabilities in data transfer. An attack on an electronic system can be scaled up easily because it only requires a single person breaking into the system, which doesn’t even need to be in the same country. A targeted cyberattack only requires exploiting a weak point to paralyze a nationwide network.
On the other hand, paper ballots have been the conventional method for centuries. While not perfect, a paper system is more difficult to manipulate because it requires more active manpower to meddle with many individual ballot boxes rather than with a single electronic system.
Technical issues aside, the more important argument against electronic voting is the philosophical issue of confidence. The systems and infrastructure for electronic voting are far less intuitive than those for paper ballots.
Yes, in an ideal situation, a central program for counting and transferring voter data will be protected by specialists committed to using the most sophisticated security measures. However, the general public cannot be expected to know how such systems work and this lack of knowledge will inevitably lead to a distrust of the elections themselves.
Conspiracy theories and misinformation campaigns often feed on complex subjects that the general public is not exposed to. Replacing the easily verifiable paper voting with electronic voting will only fuel conspiracies about election security and weaken confidence in the electoral system. This isn’t simply a case of anti-intellectualism; a voting system must be transparent and straightforward so that anyone, regardless of their education, can understand it.
Safeguarding electronic voting fails at this point because the issues within an electronic system contradict. A straightforward electronic voting system will be weak against attacks, but a complex electronic system will not be intuitive and therefore untrustworthy to the ordinary voter.
Is a paper ballot system perfectly secure? Of course not, but it is more developed by centuries of history and a legal system that is both solidified and understandable to the public. Electronic voting, even in the best possible environment, requires people to trust a system they will rightly be suspicious of and likely not understand.
We are living in an age where the digitization of jobs and functions has brought advantages, but has also exposed weaknesses. Important areas like banking, infrastructure and communications now operate in an electronic world that is faster but vulnerable to attacks that can quickly and easily exacerbate. Elections are the kind of operations where risks that would otherwise be tolerable cannot be taken in the name of protecting national security.
The lengths to which we need to go to make and maintain a system that guarantees anonymity, developed enough to be secure and yet also simple enough for all to understand, is at every level impractical. It isn’t antiprogress to oppose electronic voting and it should not be used for large-scale elections that decide the future of a nation.
Deniz Gulay is a junior double-majoring in history and Russian.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.