A few days ago, the author of these lines came across a piece of news about Deputy Baloga’s bill on “electronic ballot boxes.” The bill proposes installing a “scanning device and peripheral equipment” on the ballot box. The purpose of these devices is “automated acceptance, recognition, and counting of ballots”—and the taxpayer will pay 400 million hryvnias for this pleasure.
This is a perfect example of how the state operates. “Improvements” are always aimed at ensuring that fundamentally nothing changes and, of course, that the structures close to the reformer earn a little extra money in the process.
Let us assume for a second that voting in elections is truly necessary and that it changes something. If we want to improve this procedure, we might first ask ourselves why we need these ballots, ballot boxes, polling stations, commissions, and central election commissions. All these mechanisms are from the pre-electronic era, in which there are no computers, internet, or mobile communications. By the way, the same applies to one-day voting and the secret ballot. In reality, these are procedures used for decision-making in clubs and similar communities. Secret ballot was often necessary here because club members, as a rule, personally know each other and don’t want knowledge of how each person voted to affect their relationships. The state transferred this principle to “general elections” and has been telling everyone for about a hundred years how honest it is, because its voting is secret—the government, they say, doesn’t know who voted against it. One-day voting is also a purely technical matter, not a matter of principle or concept. The reason is obvious: the need to maintain counters, result processors, observers, and controllers.
In the internet age, none of this is necessary. There is no need to purchase ballot boxes and print ballots, to hire members of election commissions. There is no need to vote on one day. In the internet age, what is needed is a database, secure channels, and a convenient interface. That’s all.
There are no technical difficulties with voting in elections via the internet. Specifically, the task is to ensure the correspondence between a physical person and the vote recorded in the database. One can come up with many ways to do this. For example, through registration in the database using one’s passport and several additional pieces of information that you can easily provide in court1 to confirm that you are you. At any time, you can verify whether you are registered in the database. If some villain registered in it under your name (yes, we all know that Ukrainian passport data is available to many, thanks to the currency exchange procedure), you should file a claim against such an account on the voting website and appear in court (or go through another recognized procedure) to certify your identity, after which such an account should be deleted. In this case, it is a matter of legislation, not technology.
Again, if there is no fixed voting date, then registering a fake account under your name practically loses its meaning. Ballot stuffing is only useful for momentary and anonymous voting. If, however, voting is personalized and stretched over time, the person whose vote was used has every opportunity and time to find out about it and correct the error.
Finally, nothing prevents the voter from obtaining some certificate that would confirm the fact of his voting in a certain way. If you suddenly discover that in the final voting results your vote was cast for another candidate—the certificate will allow correcting such an unpleasant state of affairs2.
All of this requires no budget money, only changes in legislation. The creation of a database and functions of providers can be carried out by internet providers and mobile operators already existing on the market. Legislation should not fix some agent authorized to provide election data; it should only define the requirements for the data.
There is no need to abolish paper analog elections. Let “grandmothers who don’t have the internet” vote on some appointed day, as happens now. Everyone else can vote, say, for six months before that date. The election date, in the form we are used to, is simply the date of the end of voting for everyone.
Such changes, which do not, I note, affect the electoral system, but only the method of voting, would be a real reform and improvement that does not require taxpayer money. Moreover, they would be very useful, so to speak, “for the future,” since a person voting by clicking a mouse or sending an SMS inevitably thinks, for example, about why he needs 450 intermediaries in this matter. Well, and then quite interesting thoughts already appear.