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Cyberdemocracy Slowly Making Its Mark
by Paul G. Schreier, Contributing Editor

Some uses of the Internet are so obvious, it's hard to understand why they are taking so long to implement. In other cases, people's reservations are easy to understand. One such event took place recently here in Switzerland. Just last month people in the small town of Anières, located in the state of Geneva, had the option of voting online in a local referendum to decide whether to fund renovations for some town-owned facilities. While some attempts at online voting have already been made, such as a primary ballot in Arizona, this is believed to be the first time voters could submit an online ballot for a legally binding decision. I prefer not to get into an argument as to whether this was really the first use of e-voting or not. Instead, I'd like to think for a minute about the process and its implications.

This experiment is one of several being conducted in Switzerland, with other similar trials planned for the states of Zurich and Neuenburg. You can read a detailed background report (in English) issued by the State of Geneva concerning the rationale behind the Geneva Internet Voting System and a discussion of various issues of e-democracy. The report summarizes most of the statistics you'll find in the many newspaper reports that have been printed around the world both before and after the vote in Anières.

The total number of registered voters in Anières is just somewhat more than a thousand. Thus this attempt appears to be more a proof of concept than a national endorsement of the method. The Swiss are concerned about slowly eroding voter participation. By our standards in the U.S., I'd say that participation is already relatively high. Officials in Anières were especially pleased that voter turnout improved from the normal level of approximately 50% to almost 2/3. I remember in my small New Hampshire town that we were lucky to get a quarter of registered voters to turn up for local elections, and if we held them as often as the Swiss do to decide on so many little things, I seriously doubt that it would stay even that high.

One thing that helps keep turnout high is that you don't have to go to the polls on voting day (always a Sunday). Indeed, in this case only 6% bothered to be there in person. Normally, the rest vote by mail, but in this case 50% used mail-in ballots and 44% used e-voting. This flexibility is almost required because of the frequency of balloting. In the Swiss method of government, binding referendums are a way of life. Any citizen can trigger a nationwide vote by gathering 100,000 signatures on a petition. As a result, the Swiss have the opportunity to vote an average of five times a year. The fact that they still get 50% or more participation even for local elections amazes me.

While Anières' experiment with e-voting appears to have received positive coverage around the world, the fact that people could vote online didn't raise many eyebrows here. For instance, on the day after the official vote, one of Zurich's largest daily newspapers gave it a mere four paragraphs tucked inside. However, some of the most detailed and thoughtful discussion of the Swiss experiment and e-voting in general that I read was on Slashdot.

There people raised one of the most obvious concerns—those dealing with security. In this Anières test, each person had to enter a 16-digit voter ID number taken from materials received through the mail from the local voting office, and after filling in the ballot, it was also necessary to enter a second number, this time from a scratch-off field on the letter. Voters also had to submit their birthdate and home town. This scheme was apparently secure enough to prevent a group of people hired by the government to try and hack the system from doing so successfully.

Online security isn't really that much on the minds of the Swiss as far as I can tell. One reason is that the Swiss are generally technology-friendly. Over here we routinely use the Internet for something that most people might consider more important than voting in a local election—conducting our daily financial affairs through e-banking. For small purchases you either pay with pocket money or use a Cash Card with an electronic chip that holds the equivalent of cash. For most items or services larger than a few dollars, you get a payment slip that you take to the local bank or post office and transfer the funds. Today, though, it's routine to enter the information from that slip into a PC program supplied by the bank and pay the bills online. In the last few years, e-banking has become very popular, and a personal checking account is almost unheard of here. In fact, I do my business with the largest bank in Switzerland, and they don't even offer individual customers any type of account where you can physically write a check. Instead, I now pay about virtually all of my regular bills, including rent, utilities, health insurance, doctor bills, and anything of that nature using my PC. I have yet to read about anybody losing money through such systems. If people here trust their pocketbooks to the Internet, wouldn't it seem clear they would also trust their ballots to it as well?

Don't think, though, that despite claims from the e-voting organizers, that this trial represents a country-wide endorsement. That same local newspaper I referred to earlier ran an online poll, and at the time I checked results only roughly 13% said they find online voting encourages democracy, another 40% find it forward-looking, and 1.6% said they don't vote. What really surprised me was that the remaining roughly 40%—the same number as find it forward-looking—believe it is a danger to democracy.

From my perspective, I endorse the idea enthusiastically. Most of you probably have no idea how frustrating it can be to do absentee balloting from abroad. The first step is getting your local community to get you the ballot on time; last year for one election I received mine the day after the election. How many people, I wonder, even go through the hassle to get an absentee ballot? Then after you fill it out, you can only hope that it ends up in the right hands and actually gets counted. The simplicity and immediacy of online voting is extremely appealing to me. I'm sure it would increase voter turnout from expats by a wide margin. And when I read about how close some elections are these days, I think that every vote does count more than ever.

By the way, the ballot issue in Anières did pass, 451 to 284. Four people who tried e-voting were not successful—three because of their equipment (or lack of knowledge in using it?), and one couldn't identify himself because of some problems with accuracy checking when it came to identifying the home town. Certainly a few bugs must be worked out of the system. But in a decade, I think we'll be voting online and won't think twice about it.

 

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