We might have online voting for elections real soon, it seems. On Twitter, Comelec Commissioner Rowena Guanzon announced that Comelec was looking into using mobile apps for voting. “Four suppliers of mobile app voting program/system (sic) offered to conduct a test run for Comelec. If successful, we will ask Congress to pass a law,” she writes.
She also noted that the Comelec will be open and transparent about the testing, adding that non-partisan electoral watchdogs like National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections, Lente Philippines, and Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting will be invited to observe and criticize the process.
It should be noted that while mobile voting could attract more voters and improve voter turnout on election day, there are many hurdles an app of that nature has to pass through in order to be a viable way of voting. In The Verge’s “Why can’t you vote online,” journalist T.C. Sottek notes the requirements that a voting system has to meet: “secrecy (so people can’t find out how you voted), privacy (so people can’t stand over your shoulder at the ballot box and coerce you), accountability (so votes can be verified as authentic), uniqueness (so people can only vote once), and accuracy (so votes are recorded correctly). Good voting systems should also be reliable, flexible, convenient, and cost-effective.”
Sottek adds that “for remote internet voting to be feasible and meaningful, it has to fulfill all of these criteria adequately, and experts are skeptical that an internet voting system could meet all of these needs.” He cites leading expert on internet voting David Dill, who stresses that despite the convenience such a voting system could offer, personal devices are susceptible to malware and hackers that could steal votes.
In a separate article for Stanford University, Dill notes that online voting could also threaten the entire legitimacy of an election. “If you have an election system where fraud can be committed and—this is very important—that fraud is undetectable, then you don’t really have a reason to trust the outcome of the election. And that’s very bad in a democracy, because the whole goal of an election is to satisfy the people who lost the election that they lost fair and square and that the candidate who is elected is legitimate.”
He also notes that “the dangerous thing about internet voting is it appeals to a lot of people on the grounds that they use the internet for other stuff and it seems like voting should be easy. They don’t stop to ask the computer scientists and don’t even think it’s controversial. Legislators say this sounds like a great idea and write a bill, and such bills have gotten passed without significant debate because it just seems like an obvious thing. There’s no technical input.”
Other countries, however, have already implemented internet voting to varying success. Estonia was the world’s first to implement it in 2005, and its elections have been running “without a hitch,” according to Time. The same cannot be said for Malaysia’s People’s Justice Party, though, which had to postpone its 2018 election for party leaders because of technical problems that plagued its online system.
Featured photo courtesy of Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash
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