Democracy - Power to the PC

By: Jonathan Brazil

Just recently I was sitting down to a tea break, thinking about the many ways in which we accept computers as part of our everyday lives. As a person who works with computers day in day out, I sometimes forget just how much of our everyday lives are entrusted to these boxes of electronics and the people that write software for them. Over the past twelve months there has been a number of high profile events in the news, often under the most horrific of circumstances such as abductions, paedophile activity, etc where the police have been able to trace evidence related to the case to Internet activity. The Internet has become an aid to the law in solving these crimes. On a less terrifying level, supermarkets are now completely computer controlled; every time you use a "clubcard" somebody somewhere knows what you've eaten for breakfast. Even our own system of democracy is falling into the grasp of this electronic quagmire.

E-voting was the term coined in this years election, when for the first time in this country people were allowed to cast their votes electronically at certain polling stations. At first glance this seems like a great advancement. The counting of votes under these circumstances should be almost instantaneous and one would hope that no recounts would be requested but if they were, you would hope that the results would be exactly the same. The Minister for the Environment at the time, Noel Dempsey, suggested that electronic voting "will dramatically speed up the counting process, with results for the constituencies likely to be available within a half an hour of the final module, on which the cast votes are stored, being delivered to the counting centres."

However, we must remember that e-voting will happen on a computer running software. The voting system is the very foundation of any democratic country and it is paramount that people have faith in the system so that they can make their country work for them.

Two important points to note when thinking about this situation are:

Fact: Software can contain bugs that cause errors, and electronic records are easily changed (either by accident or on purpose)
Myth: People have complete faith in computers

Are there any risks associated with e-voting? I cannot answer that question directly but I can provide background to the type of suspicions that people may have. Any techie type person will tell you that to change the behaviour of any piece of software is a very simple task that is achievable in a number of different ways. Tweaking the operating system or software of the computer accepting the votes can change every vote accepted by that system. Then there is the ever-present issue of bugs in software. A bug in a piece of software can cause dramatic events. Some years ago an emergency call centre in England launched a control system for dispatching ambulances. This system had a bug that caused extreme delays in notifying the ambulance crew, almost to the extent that undertakers where arriving before the paramedics.

People are very shrewd and when it comes to political matters they are doubly so. It is reassuring when they can see their vote entering the ballot box on a piece of tangible paper and that they can visit the counting houses if they want to. I am not suggesting that anyone would try to rig an election but could you imagine the widespread panic that would ensue should somebody question the rigging of an election when there is no paper evidence to prove otherwise?