Attn. Comelec, Congress: Why automation is wrong

Paper balloting can be subjected to proper controls. Humans can check the handling of ballots, which are visible and tangible objects. Why do most progressive countries use paper ballots instead of voting machines? Why have the 31 that automated their elections, led by Germany, reverted to manual? Those techno-savvy states know better. Electronic voting is so prone to fraud it could produce unelected rulers. Yet poor Philippines is the biggest spender on automation.

Perhaps there are still some up there in Congress and the Comelec who, un-bought, can turn the tide. Learn from poll automation analyst Emanuele Lombardi’s “Electronic Voting and Democracy.” Excerpts:

“It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.

“Dictatorships are usually set up and preserved by violence, but power can also be taken and preserved using electoral fraud. If such fraud were to go undetected, electoral results would no longer rely on our votes. We, the people, would not even notice we had lost Democracy because we would continue voting.

“In more than two centuries no western democracy had any serious trouble from using paper ballots. Today most democracies use paper to elect Parliaments and Governments.

“Hardware and software vendors are pressing for electronic voting, and Governments often endorse it. Most people see electronic voting as a mere technical evolution of paper ballot voting, so they confidently wait for hard- and software that will make electronic electing as secure as, say, remote banking. They think voting is a simple transaction by which we add ‘1’ to the electoral ‘balance’ of our candidate, the way we add money to someone’s bank balance when we use our credit card. Yet voting is not like banking because votes and financial data differ in the level of the secrecy they require. Such intrinsic difference is the reason electronic voting is unfit for elections in a Democracy. No technology can change that. That the ‘barrier’ has been overcome with the use of strong cryptographic techniques, homo-morphic protocols, etc., are mere claims.

“To see why electronic voting is incompatible with Democracy, let us go through a few basic concepts:

“(1) In a Democracy, governmental power is transferred by counting secret votes during elections. To accept such transfer people and parties must be 100% sure that electoral results are fair and square: doubts about the legitimacy of the winner can damage the political life of the country, and even spur riots and revolutions.

“(2) Votes must be forever secret; otherwise, voters could undergo illicit pressure to vote according to somebody else’s will. Criminals or governments or politicians have power to compel people to vote a certain way.

“(3) Electoral procedures are set up and managed by large organizations that span across the country, and give contracts to private and public companies.

“(4) Many people and organizations are interested in falsifying electoral results to maintain or get governmental power. They can be highly motivated, well financed, sophisticated, and could be outsiders as well as insiders with full knowledge of the election system. The attackers could be political operatives, voters, vendor personnel, polling place workers, election administrators, foreign countries, international terrorist organizations, or plain pranksters.

“(5) Sitting governments are in charge of guaranteeing the accuracy of electoral results and secrecy of votes. But social and economic powers that are the base of any government have obvious interest in falsifying electoral results and violating the secrecy of votes to preserve power. They succeed, thanks to their complete control over the electoral process.

“Therefore, absolute vote secrecy can be accomplished only if votes are collected and stored in a way that nobody is able to link each vote to its voter.

“If votes are anonymous, then nobody can verify that any of them is the one its (unknown) voter actually cast.

“Verification of electoral results cannot be based solely on anonymous votes, since they could have been altered by fraud or errors and nobody could ever know.

“The only guarantee of fairness of elections is for the procedures to make sure each vote represents its (unknown) elector’s will.

“We can’t blindly trust any organization when dealing with elections; thus we, the people, need to verify that those electoral procedures work as they should.

“Paper balloting can be subjected to proper controls. Humans can check the handling of ballots, which are visible and tangible objects. Paper ballot elections are suitable for Democracy.

“Electronic elections can’t be subjected to proper democratic control because computer procedures are not verifiable by humans. We are not equipped to verify operations occurring inside machines.

“Due to vote secrecy, elections have neither known input nor any expected output with which to compare electoral results. Thus, electronic electoral procedures cannot be humanly verified.

“Results of any electronic vote are, by their nature, unverifiable. No technical solution can overcome that fact.

“Electronic voting is incompatible with Democracy. Imagine having a perfect electronic voting system, with all the security, auditing, accountability, meaningful public standards, and public evaluation. Even in such optimistic case, the votes would be stored in anonymous records. Such unverifiable data, processed by unverifiable electronic procedures, would decide the (unverifiable) winner of the election.

“Electronic voting is not a technical, but social problem. Governments can’t demonstrate that electronic voting results are correct, and Opposition parties have no way to support any claim that fraud or mistakes have occurred.

“No democratic control is possible over electronic elections. For electoral results to be verifiable and ballots absolutely secret, votes must be anonymous, tangible, human-readable objects.

“The greatest supporters of electronic voting are ruling governments and hardware/software vendors. In their propaganda they want people to believe electronic vote poses only technical problems.”

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