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The Political Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 2, AprilJune 2014

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-923X.2014.00000.x

Putting Electronic Voting under the Microscope

SARAH BIRCH, PAUL COCKSHOTT AND KAREN RENAUD

Abstract
Electronic voting entered the political arena some years ago, with some countries advocating its
use, some countries trialling and then abandoning it and yet others preferring to preserve the
status quo of paper-and-pencil voting within a voting booth. In this paper we present the pros
and cons of electronic voting and propose a set of characteristics we think electronic voting
systems should exhibit. We then briey review some pertinent concerns, issues and worries.
We conclude by introducing the Handivote system, an electronic voting system that supports
voting by means of SMS messaging, and explain how it measures up in terms of our own
specied characteristics.
Keywords: electronic voting, democracy, challenges, Handivote

Introduction
We live in the digital age, where virtually all
aspects of our lives are enhanced by cuttingedge technology. Voting has long been the
exception, still carried out with bits of paper
and stubby pencils; many countries have
recently turned to electronic voting, however,
and technological developments in this area
have been rapid. It seems a reasonable move,
given increasing population sizes, the prevalence of voter apathy and the costs associated
with traditional elections. If voting technology
is brought up to date, many believe there will
be a range of benets.
Yet there are those who feel that there are
problems related to electronic voting, and that
such problems should give us pause before
we unhesitatingly embrace this new move.
Voting is, in many respects, unlike the myriad
other actions we carry out in our daily lives
with the help of the latest technology. Integrity of voting is crucial, else the whole edice
of our democratic system may be placed at
risk. Moreover, voting must be seen to be
conducted properly if the condence of the
electorate is to be maintained.
This paper reviews recent developments in
electronic voting and proposes a potential
solution to the problems that this technology
has heretofore encountered. This solution
maximises transparency and accessibility,
which actively seeks to promote trust, some-

thing we believe will be essential if voters are

to accept this new voting paradigm.

The pros of electronic voting

Electronic balloting comes in degrees. At its
least sophisticated, voters may still mark
paper ballot forms in standard polling stations. The papers are then optically scanned
and electronically counted. At the next level
up, the capture of the voters intention is
performed by a device, and the resulting
records are electronically counted. The
devices themselves may be mechanical, as
with the older punched card voting machines
used in the US, or they may be entirely
electronic. Finally, the electronic voting system may support remote voting, using a
device under the voters control such as a
mobile telephone or a PC to capture the
voters intention before transmitting the
results for electronic tallying.
The possible advantages of electronic voting vary according to the degree of electrication, but generally speaking they include
speed, accuracy and cost. The nineteenth-century scientist Charles Babbage said that he
was originally driven to invent the rst
mechanical computer after spending long
hours checking manually prepared mathematical tables for arithmetic errors. Reliability in
calculation, he reasoned, required it to be
done by steam. This too was the rst promise

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of electronic voting systems: they would eliminate human error in the counting process.
If tallying were simply a matter of adding
reliably, the advantages of electronics would
be unquestionable. However, counting votes
requires more than just reliable addition.
Before votes can be counted, they must be
reliably recorded and recognised. The role
played by hanging chads in the rst George
Bushs rst election victory showed that the
mechanical recording of votes can be errorprone and controversial. This is probably
even more the case when optical scanners
are used to capture data from paper ballots.
There was a high level of rejected papers in
the 2007 Scottish election in which optical
scanners were used.
While there have been issues with some
currently used electronic voting systems, one
undisputed advantage is that they allow more
complex procedures and calculations to be
followed. For instance, the calculation procedures for some proportional representation
votes are more complex than rst-past-thepost votes, so such elections will benet from
using computerised calculations of the result.
It is also possible, in principle, to use electronic means to record and count votes in
referenda and other direct policy decision
procedures. For example, it would be possible
to have quite complex local budgeting questions put to a vote, given the appropriate
software. One can, in principle, collect voter
preferences on tax and expenditure levels and
come up with a tax and expenditure mix that
is as close as possible to the voters preferences, subject to a balanced budget constraint.
Note that votes on monetary matters like this
are not subject to Arrows impossibility theorem, which only applies to ranked preferences. If each person votes on how many
billions should be spent on each of health,
education and defence, for example, they are
not expressing a ranking but selecting a point
in three-dimensional space. If one assumes an
appropriate distance function in this space,
the simple option being to use a Euclidean
metric, then there will be a social mean position that minimises the sum of the distances of
the individual voters choices from the mean.
Projecting this onto the subspace dened by a
linear constraint like a balanced budget is a
mathematically well-dened procedure,
which could, in principle, be performed by a

human division of labourlarge numbers of

human tellers with mechanical adding
machines. In practice one can only consider
putting choices of this sort to a vote if one has
access to computers to process electronic data
resulting from the votes.
The advantage of using computers is that
they can readily handle almost arbitrarily
complex protocols to identify the optimal
alternative. If, instead, one resorts to manual
processes, then the costs in terms of sta, who
have to be paid overtime, and in terms of the
delay before results can be reported will both
grow to be unacceptable. Thus there seems to
be a strong link between the ability of voters
to give a sophisticated indication of their
preferences and the use of electronic techniques for computing the results. In this context one then has to choose the procedure by
which the vote is expressed: paper ballots that
are scanned, voting machines in polling
places or distance voting using phones and
PCs.
Nowadays digital media are the standard
mode of communication for business use, and
they are increasingly becoming the standard
communications means for public administration of taxes, benets etc. They have the
advantage that they allow the reliable collection of data in a form suitable for automatic
processing. With the widespread penetration
of the internet into homes and the even wider
use of mobile phone technology, barriers to
their use are now substantially lower than
those to sending letters by post. The incremental cost in terms of money and personal
labour time of sending a text message, for
example, is much lower than that involved
in posting a letter. In terms of personal time
spent, sending a text message takes a couple
of minutes, while lling in and mailing a
postal ballot probably takes at least fteen
minutes. Walking to a polling station, voting
and walking back is likely to take more like
thirty minutes. So, even though no cost is
involved in placing a postal ballot and there
is no charge at the polls, if we value voter time
at even the minimum wage, the cost of casting
a vote exceeds 3.
It must be acknowledged that there are
other more complex issues involved in voter
motivation and behaviour that raise questions
about the safety of a switch to electronic
voting. Baston and Ritchie1 published an

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analysis of voter turnout and advanced a

number of potential solutions. They dismiss
electronic voting as a sticking-plaster solution and point out there is a lack of hard
evidence that electronic voting increases voter
participation. They argue for the need to
inform, educate and engage the electorate,
essentially blaming voter apathy on a more
fundamental malaise than mere inconvenience. Some countries, such as Australia,
side-step apathy by requiring their citizens
to vote, on pain of penalty.
In 2008 the Electoral Commission of the UK
reported a major increase in the number of
citizens who vote using a postal vote, instead
of visiting the polling booths. They also, however, express concerns with respect to the
safety of such votes. This leads us to consider,
in the following section, what aspects of voting could compromise the integrity thereof.

Concerns, issues and worries

Despite the clear benets of electronic voting
in facilitating rapid, accurate and cost-eective balloting, the use of technology in the
electoral process also carries with it a variety
of dangers, both technological and democratic.
The rst and most obvious danger is that
the system might not work, resulting in electoral processes that cannot be completed due
to technical glitches. Problems of this type are
most common in less developed contexts
where electric power supplies may be intermittent, polling stations may be dusty and
sta may not be well trained in using the
technology at hand. Yet even a number of
developed democracies, including Scotland
and London, have experienced considerable
problems ensuring that electronic balloting
machines perform as intended.
A second problem relates to condence in what
happens inside the black box of the voting
and/or counting machine. Even if voting and
counting are carried out in the absence of evident problems, it still may be, as noted above,
that peoples preferences are not accurately
recorded, tallied or reported. All voting systems
can of course yield the wrong result, but the
opacity of electronic devices in comparison with
old-fashioned paper ballots means that concerns
about accuracy may be more dicult to allay.
Electronic voting systems thus need to include
some means of tracing the vote from the moment

the voter indicates their choice to the nal result.

Guaranteeing an audit trail that is transparent
to the individual casting the vote but secret to all
others has been one of the principal challenges
confronting those who design electronic balloting technologies.

Another challenge is ensuring that the means

by which votes are recorded, counted and
tabulated is transparent to those who take
administrative responsibility for the polling
process, namely electoral administrators. The
public ocials in charge of running elections
are accountable to the electorate for the procedures they employ, but one of the problems
associated with many electronic voting and
counting systems is that they rely on proprietary technology developed by private-sector
rms and sold (or leased) to the public-sector
bodies in which voting takes place. The most
obvious means of guaranteeing that public
ocials can vouch for the balloting procedures they use is to require them to be based on
open-source software, but for commercial
reasons voting technology rms are often
reluctant to disclose the details of the systems
they have developed, which generates common accountability decits where electronic
voting is used.
The above cited challenges relate to electronic voting devices located in polling stations as well as those located elsewhere. A
number of additional concerns are raised by
remote electronic voting, particularly voting
that takes place outside the public sphere. The
rst major issue raised by remote electronic
voting is the challenge of ensuring that the
votes cast are transmitted to those in charge of
tabulating them in a manner that is secure and
is widely believed to be secure. In addition to
this technological challenge, there is also the
democratic challenge of guaranteeing that
votes are cast in secret when they are cast
away from a polling station. The secret ballot
is one of the cornerstones of the international
human rights regime, enshrined in a host of
international legal instruments from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the
International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights to the European Convention on
Human Rights (ECHR). Indeed, the secret
ballot is the only ECHR right, other than
that prohibiting torture, from which there
can be no derogation. It is also worth noting
that the secret ballot is not a right that indivi-

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duals can voluntarily forfeit. In as much as

voting is a civic and not a private act, voters
are not at liberty to decide to waive their right
to vote in secret. When voting is conducted in
a public spacebe it a traditional polling
station, a public building or a voting kiosk
on the streetmaintaining ballot secrecy is
relatively straightforward, as public spaces
can be monitored and controlled. Once voting
is brought into the private sphere, however, it
becomes far more dicult for stage agencies
to guarantee that electoral choices will be
made in secret. In private spaces such as the
home or the oce, there are numerous value
systems that compete with those of democracy; should civic duty be judged by a voter
to be less important in a given instance than
their duty as a spouse, child, friend or
employee, then ballot secrecy could well be
compromised. Many voters will, in private
contexts, be subjected to subtle and not-sosubtle pressures to vote in front of others and
to vote in ways of which others approve.
Many might succumb to such pressures and
thereby forfeit their sincere contribution to the
democratic process for the sake of friendship,
conjugal harmony or job prospects. Guaranteeing ballot secrecy in the private sphere,
while at the same time respecting the voters
right to privacy, is a signicant challenge for
all forms of remote voting, both paper-based
(postal) and electronic.
Failures can arise from deciencies in the
recording equipment, especially if the software has not been veried. Once one moves
to systems in which the recording is done by
pressing electric buttons or by using a touch
screen, one has to add deliberate misreporting
to accidental misreading. Who is to say that a
software device whose records are on a disk
drive or USB stick does not deliberately misread some of the votes? If the owners of the
software company that produces the equipment are known to have strong political
preferences, this can give rise to considerable
suspicion, as with the controversy over the
role of Diebold voting machines in the 2004
US Presidential Election.
A nal concern with remote voting is that
when the voting act is removed from the
public sphere and allowed to take place in
private spaces, its civic character is potentially
threatened, as there is a danger that the distinct values that pertain to private life will be

applied to the voting act, rather than those

that pertain to civic duty and public life.
Whereas civic values emphasise publicspiritedness and action in the public interest,
private domains are typically characterised by
self-interest, consumerism and cultural parochialism. The act of physically displacing
voting from the public to the private realm
could thus potentially undermine its civic
character. Further empirical research should
probably be done to assess the scale of this
danger.

Experiences with electronic voting

Despite the many challenges associated with
electronic voting, this technology is widely
used in the private and voluntary sectors,
and in recent decades numerous jurisdictions
have adopted it for public elections. India and
Brazil are perhaps the best known cases in
which electronic voting machines are used in
polling stations, but some form of electronic
aid to the in-person balloting process is
employed many other states. Remote electronic voting is less common, being used
regularly for national elections only in Estonia
but for lower-level elections and vote trials in a
number of other jurisdictions, including Australia, Canada, France, India, Norway, Switzerland, the UK and the US. Several states,
including Ireland, the Netherlands, Paraguay
and Germany, have developed electronic inperson voting systems only to abandon them
amid concerns over security and cost.

A possible solution
HandiVote, an open-source voting system,
supports SMS-based voting, increasing convenience and accessibility. It also provides
complete transparency of votingvoters are
able (and possibly encouraged by political
parties)to verify that their vote was correctly recorded and the system has entered
the nal result, resolving the audit trail problem raised earlier. With HandiVote there is no
need for complicated cryptographic procedures, therefore there is also no requirement for
devices with high processing power or additional expensive equipment. The fact that the
software is open and that no cryptography is
used should make the process more comprehensible to public ocials.

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Figure 1. Handivote voting stages

Any voting process typically involves the
following stages (see Figure 1):
(a) Voter registration
(b) Voting
(c) Publishing the outcome.
It must be stressed from the outset that
Handivote emphasises accessibility and relies
on the voters en masse to detect anomalies. We
believe that the inclusiveness and understandability of Handivote has the potential
to encourage greater levels of participation,
but this would require an accompanying
awareness drive in order to encourage voters
to participate.

Registration
Handivote requires voters to register deliberately, and during this process people receive a
voter card. How this is done depends on the
context, but the key point is that the voter card
is randomly allocated to the voter. Each card
bears a unique voter number. This number
can be split into two elds: a voter ID that
makes up the leading digits and a random

secret PIN making up the trailing digits. The

digit length has to be sucient to ensure that
the IDs can be unique.
(a) For an opinion poll where voting is associated with households, rather than citizens, this process can be automated by
delivering the cards, inside individual
envelopes to ensure anonymity, to each
household. In this case it is important that
the process by which cards are allocated
to house addresses is mechanically random. There would have to be a doubleenvelope system, with the inner envelopes
tumbled in a rotating bin before being fed
into addressed outer envelopes.
(b) If it is an election in which each citizen is
permitted to vote, voters would need to
register, in person, by presenting proof of
identity to the voting commission. A note
would be taken to make sure that voters
register only once, and that only eligible
voters are permitted to register. Voters
choose a sealed envelope, containing a
voter card, from a shued jar.
When the registration period closes, the list of
voter IDs on any leftover cards would be

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Figure 2. Qualities to be preserved by voting systems

published and registered by the HandiVote

system. This would be done in order to ensure
that leftover cards are not used to register fake
votes. The assumption is that the national and
local authorities may, during the period of
voter registration, put several issues to popular vote, so that the eort of personally attending the place of voter registration would be
amortised over more than one actual voting
event.
For a voting population the size of the UK,
the cards would contain a twelve-digit card
number if only digits are used, but this could
be shortened if alphabetic characters are used
as well. The rst eight digits serve uniquely to
identify the card and the remaining four
digits are a condential PIN. The model here
is the procedure followed by banks, who use a
long number identifying the cards they issue
and a shorter verication code. We refer to the
eight-digit number as the voter ID.

Voting
Voters place their vote by sending a text
message containing the full voter number
(including the PIN) and the vote. Any repeat
vote that is dierent from the original vote
will void the rst and any subsequent votes.
This reduces the protability of stealing voter
cards.

Verication
At the end of the referendum, votes are
counted electronically and the result is published. Voter IDs, grouped by the option they
voted for, without the PIN, are published.
This allows voters to verify that their votes
have been recorded correctly and have
entered the nal result. This arrangement
also allows the public to verify that the votes
were counted correctly. All unused voter IDs
are also published. This ensures that the
insertion of any fake votes is likely to be
detected.

Evaluating Handivote
A number of concerns were raised about
various essential characteristics of the democratic vote with respect to electronic voting.
Figure 2 depicts the qualities that have to be
preserved by any voting system. Let us consider how the concerns expressed in the earlier section can be addressed by Handivote.
The rst concern is that the system could
fail. Certainly the last year or two has given us
many examples of spectacular IT failures, and
this is undeniably a serious concern. There are
a number of points of failure, each of which
will have to be replicated in order to provide
resilience to failure. There are wellestablished techniques developed for contexts
in which failures would lead to loss of life,

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which can be deployed. There is, as always, a

tension between total resilience to hardware
or software failure and the expense involved.
Hence the real problem in this respect will be
budget, not the ability to deploy failure-resistant systems.
The next concern is that of transparency
with respect both to the voter him or herself
and to the public ocials engaged in the
process. This concern is also warranted, since
some of the early uses of electronic voting
machines in the US led to results that the
population did not believe were legitimate.
They might have been, but the opacity of the
process, and the absence of a clear audit trail,
meant that the detractors could not be proven
wrong. Handivote addresses this by providing a verication phase once voting has concluded. Every voter can check whether their
vote was indeed recorded as cast, and that all
votes have been tallied correctly. This is done
by publishing on the internet the lists of voter
IDs cast for each alternative. Since the IDs
uniquely identify the cards, individuals can
readily check, using the normal search facility
of their browser, that their card number
appears attached to the correct alternative.
Similarly, anyone can download the lists and
verify that the number of entries in the lists
correspond to the published totals. Since the
PINs associated with the IDs are not published, it would be impossible for anyone to
use other peoples published voter IDs in
future polls. Moreover, in line with good
security practice, the code for Handivote
would be publicly available, open to scrutiny
by anyone who wished to verify its soundness. This transparency ought to go a long
way towards assuring voters of the integrity
of the process.
The nal problem, secrecy, is hard to address with remote voting. Whenever people
vote in an unconstrained and unmonitored
environment, it becomes possible for people
to coerce others into voting in a particular
way, or for voters to sell their votes. Fraud is
facilitated in ways that are less possible when
people vote in a polling booth. This is, of
course, also true of postal voting. At present,
we provide for the voiding of votes if contradictory messages are sent using the same
voting card. Thus a person who has been
coerced can, with the present system, privately wipe out that coerced vote, but only if

the coercer allows them to retain their card or

if they have had the foresight to record the
card number before coercion takes place.
Unfortunately, this leaves them in the same
position as a person who abstains. We have
suggested that voters who do not have telephones could place votes from polling places
equipped with phones, and that any vote
from such a venue would override a vote
coming in on an ordinary phone. While in
principle this gives people the safeguard of
being able to go to a polling place, one can see
that there might be family circumstances in
which a family member, having initially been
coerced into voting using a mobile phone,
would not have the courage to then go to a
polling place to override it. The very mechanism that ensures public auditing also ensures
that the coercing party would uncover such
subterfuge.
It is also possible that a portion of the
electorate might collude in allowing their
vote choice to be altered via social interaction,
either because their vote choice is of less value
to them than their willingness to please their
friends and family members, or because they
are oered a nancial reward for which they
are prepared to relinquish their electoral
autonomy. Remote voting systems, whether
postal or electronic, suer potential problems
of vote-selling. People intent on selling their
vote can photograph their postal ballot forms,
or give out their card IDs in systems like
Handivote. Whether the selling of votes rises
to signicant levels does not depend just on
how easily voters can prove how they vote. It
also depends on culture, the degree of honesty in the population, the possibility of being
detected and prosecuted for attempting to rig
the vote and the amount of the vote that you
would have to rig to alter the outcome. If you
need to throw millions of votes to change the
outcome, and if the population is highly lawabiding, then you will have to make
approaches to a number of potentially honest
people who may report you to the police. The
whole exercise becomes too risky. If, on the
other hand, you have a highly marginal constituency using rst-past-the-post, then buying a small number of votes could tilt the
outcome. Hence a remote voting system,
whether electronic or postal, may not be
appropriate for rst-past-the-post constituency elections.

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For this reason Handivote is best designed

for use either in consultative referenda or in
contexts where voters can be expected to have
a strong stake in the outcome of the election
(e.g. trade union votes or votes for leadership
positions within private organisations) and
may not be so well suited to public elections
where the state has an absolute duty to
guarantee 100 per cent ballot secrecy, even
for voters who would willingly relinquish
that secrecy.

presented some examples of its use. We also

briey discussed the Handivote electronic
voting system, and explained how it addresses some of the concerns with respect to
electronic voting. Some issues remain, and
until we have found a way to address
theseif indeed such a way can be found
it is possible that electronic voting will not
enjoy widespread approval.

Conclusion

1 L. Baston and K. Ritchie, Turning out or turning

o?, Electoral Reform Society, 2004, www.
electoral-reform.org.uk/download le.php?
PublicationFile=50

In this short paper we have discussed electronic voting, debated its pros and cons and

Notes

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