Disadvantages of Electronic Voting
Despite the particular advantages to electronic voting system, there are also
drawbacks to the system. The cons of the electronic voting system should be
considered seriously by all concerned before taking any kind of random decision
on e-voting. These are:
1) Vulnerability to hacking: According to the Congressional Research
Service of Election Reform and Electronic Voting Systems, vendors and election
jurisdictions generally state that they do not transmit election results from
precincts via the internet, but they may transmit them via a direct modem
connection or Virtual Private Network (VPN). However, even this approach may be
subject to attack via the internet, especially if encryption and verification
are not sufficient. That is because telephone transmission systems are
themselves increasingly connected to the internet and computers to which the
receiving server may be connected, such as through a local area network (LAN),
may have internet connections. So, using internet would be out of the question
in case of Bangladesh where we continuously have history of suspicion over
electoral fraud.
2) Voter verified paper audit trails: All fully-electronic (touch screen,
DRE, internet) voting systems are subject to the limitations and risks of
computer technology. This includes the inability to detect the presence of
hardware and/or software that could be used, deliberately or inadvertently, to
alter election outcomes. According to Rebecca Mercuri, PhD, president, Notable
Software, democratic elections require independent verification that all
balloting choices have been recorded as intended and vote totals have been
reliably and indisputably created from the same material examined by the voters.
A Voter Verified Paper Ballot (VVPB) provides an auditable way to assure voters
that their ballots will be available to be counted. Without VVPB there is no way
to independently audit the election results.
3) Susceptibility to fraud: Voting fraud is not either present everywhere
or absent everywhere. Especially in our country, there have always been
allegations of fraud by all the losing political parties. Fraud comes in degrees
and increments. A malicious voting system created and distributed by one vendor
to hundreds of thousands of polling booths, can systematically falsify millions
of votes. Although some may believe that tampering with an electronic voting
machine is extremely hard to do, computer scientists have tampered with machines
to prove that it is quite easily done. However, if people have access to the
machines, and know how to work them, they can take the memory card out of the
machine, which stores the votes, and in place they put their own memory card
with a virus that can tamper with the votes. It is a fraud on a large scale and
wholesale level. Stuffing a ballot box, in contrast, works at a retail level. A
tamperer, however malicious and skilled, can stuff only as many ballots as might
plausibly be cast at the polling place, but a faulty and corrupted voting system
(malicious DRE software) could affect far more votes.
4) Accuracy in capturing voters’ intent: If a touch screen is used in the
elections, the sensors in touch screen devices can be knocked out of alignment
by shock and vibration that may occur during transport. Unless these sensors are
realigned at the polling place prior to the start of voting, touch screen
machines can misinterpret a voter’s intent. For example, a voter might touch the
part of the screen identified with candidate X, but candidate Y’s would light up
instead.
5) Political ties of manufacturers: The present government’s decision not
to keep the provision of caretaker government and to hold next general election
under a political government and the election commission, has made the attempt
of using e-voting system more unreasonable and unfair. Our election commission
itself were also subject to considerable amount of criticism because of its
controversial comments and actions during the emergency period after January 11
takeover, and also during the last 2008 general elections. Considering our
political culture, it is undeniably a fact that any manufacturer or company
hired for the e-voting system will tailor the e-voting machines according to the
‘needs’ of the current political party in power. So these machines will be
subject to scrutiny, distrust and inquiry from all the other political parties
in the country.
6) Malicious software programming: Any computer software is basically
generated from software programming and coding. And all these softwares could be
tampered with by a computer programmer who knows the source code. Testing
electronic voting systems for security problems, especially if they were
intentionally introduced and concealed, is basically impossible. If malicious
coding is inserted by programmers into commercial software that are triggered by
obscure combinations of commands and keystrokes via the computer keyboard, then
election results can change completely.
7) Physical security of machines: Regarding physical hardware controls,
many of the DRE (direct recording electronic voting machine) models under
examination contained weaknesses in controls designed to protect the system.
According to the USA Government Accountability office, all the locks on a
particular DRE model were easily picked, and were all controlled by the same
keys. Also a particular model of DRE was linked together with others to form a
rudimentary network. If one of these machines were accidentally or intentionally
unplugged from the others, voting functions on the other machines in the network
would be disrupted. In addition, reviewers found that switches used to turn a
DRE system on or off, as well as those used to close the polls on a particular
DRE terminal, were not protected.
8) Secure storage of cast votes: The votes that are cast using the
electronic voting machines, are stored in a safe storage or space in the
computer machine memory. But, Doug Jones, PhD, Professor of Computer Science at
University of Iowa explained in his book, Secure Electronic Voting, ‘For over a
decade, all direct recording electronic machines have been required to contain
redundant storage, but this redundant storage is not an independent record of
the votes, because it is created by the same software that created the original
record. As a result, the multiple files are of limited use to check the
correctness of the software.’