Electronic voting
It may encompass a range of Internet services, from basic transmission of tabulated results to full-function online voting through common connectable household devices.
[citation needed] A worthy e-voting system must perform most of these tasks while complying with a set of standards established by regulatory bodies, and must also be capable to deal successfully with strong requirements associated with security, accuracy, speed, privacy, auditability, accessibility, data integrity, cost-effectiveness, scalability, anonymity, trustworthiness, and sustainability.
In general, two main types of e-voting can be identified: Many countries have used electronic voting for at least some elections, including Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Concerns regarding security lapses in aging voting machines came to a head shortly before and during the 2016 United States presidential election.
[16][17] Several major reforms took place after the 2016 U.S. election, including the widespread adoption of voting machines that produce voter-verified paper audit trails (VVPATs).
These paper records allow election officials to conduct audits and recounts, significantly enhancing transparency and security.
In collaboration with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and other organizations, election officials also took steps to harden voting systems against potential cyberattacks.
This included training election officials, sharing threat intelligence, and establishing secure systems for vote transmission and counting.
[9] During the 2021 NSW Local Government Elections the online voting system "iVote" had technical issues that caused some access problems for some voters.
[33] On 9 April 2019, the Supreme Court ordered the ECI to increase voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) slips vote count to five randomly selected EVMs per assembly constituency, which means ECI has to count VVPAT slips of 20,625 EVMs before it certifies the final election results.
[39][failed verification][citation needed] Internet voting has also been widely used in sub-national participatory budgeting processes, including in Brazil, France, United States, Portugal and Spain.
[citation needed] It is unsure as to whether narrowing the digital divide would promote equal voting opportunities for people across various social, economic, and ethnic backgrounds.
[62] To the contrary, however, the introduction of online voting in municipal elections in the Canadian province of Ontario resulted in an average increase in turnout of around 3.5 percentage points.
[64] A paper on “remote electronic voting and turnout in the Estonian 2007 parliamentary elections” showed that rather than eliminating inequalities, e-voting might have enhanced the digital divide between higher and lower socioeconomic classes.
Internet voting systems have been used privately in many modern nations and publicly in the United States, the UK, Switzerland and Estonia.
Most voters in Estonia can cast their vote in local and parliamentary elections, if they want to, via the Internet, as most of those on the electoral roll have access to an e-voting system, the largest run by any European Union country.
[81] This web-of-trust protocol could even expand to allowing candidates to provide proof of personhood by physical attendance, which could lead to trusted clusters that grow into communities.
For example, King County, Washington's demographics require them under U.S. federal election law to provide ballot access in Chinese (Mandarin?).
[88] Electronic machines can use headphones, sip and puff, foot pedals, joy sticks and other adaptive technology to provide the necessary accessibility.
The concept of election verifiability through cryptographic solutions has emerged in the academic literature to introduce transparency and trust in electronic voting systems.
Electronic voting machines are able to provide immediate feedback to the voter detecting such possible problems as undervoting and overvoting which may result in a spoiled ballot.
In 2009, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany found that when using voting machines the "verification of the result must be possible by the citizen reliably and without any specialist knowledge of the subject."
Election results produced by voting systems that rely on voter-marked paper ballots can be verified with manual hand counts (either valid sampling or full recounts).
A discussion draft argued by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) states, "Simply put, the DRE architecture’s inability to provide for independent audits of its electronic records makes it a poor choice for an environment in which detecting errors and fraud is important.
The draft report includes statements from election officials, voting system vendors, computer scientists and other experts in the field about what is potentially possible in terms of attacks on DREs.
"[101] Various technologies can be used to assure DRE voters that their votes were cast correctly, and allow officials to detect possible fraud or malfunction, and to provide a means to audit the tabulated results.
[citation needed] Polling place electronic voting or Internet voting examples have taken place in Australia,[116] Belgium,[117][118] Brazil,[119] Estonia,[120][121] France, Germany, India,[122] Italy, Namibia, the Netherlands (Rijnland Internet Election System), Norway, Peru, Switzerland, the UK,[123] Venezuela,[124] Pakistan and the Philippines.
When the private-eye protagonist of the book investigates at the behest of a powerful Chinatown businesswoman, he determines that the outcome was rigged by someone who defeated the security on the city's newly installed e-voting system.
Filmed over three years, it documents American citizens investigating anomalies and irregularities with electronic voting systems that occurred during America's 2000 and 2004 elections, especially in Volusia County, Florida.
The central conflict in the MMO video game Infantry resulted from the global institution of direct democracy through the use of personal voting devices sometime in the 22nd century AD.
