Online voting faces serious, possibly insurmountable obstacles
ON MAY 3RD, months after Bolivia’s former president Evo Morales was forced to resign, the country was supposed to elect his successor. Because of covid-19, that election has been postponed. Bolivians are now stuck with a caretaker president who seems in no mood to relinquish power. They are not alone. The pandemic is playing havoc with elections worldwide. Britain, France, North Macedonia and Serbia have already postponed ballots of various sorts.
Electing presidents between Zoom calls and episodes of “Tiger King” certainly has its appeal. Studies show online voting could be half as expensive as the normal kind and far cheaper than the main alternative, voting by post. Disabled, elderly and overseas voters could certainly benefit, as could any country facing a prolonged lockdown.
Even if online voting were foolproof voters might not embrace it for years, if ever. Data security and encryption are complex. Conventional voting methods are also subject to fraud and error, but falsifying millions of paper ballots is a weighty undertaking. In contrast, electronic data are weightless, and a single flaw can in theory be exploited at large scale by anyone who finds it.
Even in Estonia, the only country to use online voting nationwide, it took several election cycles to develop trust, says Robert Krimmer, a professor of e-governance at Tallinn University. In 2005, when the country introduced the technology, just 2% of voters filled out their ballots online. In the general elections of 2019, the share reached 44%. Estonia’s system did not emerge in a vacuum. In two decades, the country has managed to digitise its entire bureaucracy.
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