Today, about 49% of the world’s population is voting for their leaders, making 2024 “the ultimate election year” in history. However, only about two-thirds of eligible citizens in the US usually vote, lagging behind over thirty other democratic nations in voter turnout.
Tedious waiting hours, far travel, and other inconveniences are major impediments to enhancing voter turnout. In fact, most of the world’s electoral systems — including the US – require citizens to mark paper ballots in physical polling stations, which are then read using optical scanners and sent to a central office, where results are counted and displayed.
The dream to encourage more participation in electing democracies seeks sanctuary in the transfiguring rise of digital voting systems. But are they safe? Why haven’t nations adopted such systems on keystone elections?
The antiquity of physical voting
Electing the candidate with the most votes is known as “first past the post” voting. Trailing back to antiquity, this method had been used to elect members of the House of Commons in England since the 14th century.
Over time, attempts to efficiently regulate and improve this system have been executed by various countries, with the most prominent being The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) federal law passed by the US Congress in 2002, boosting the security of elections through audits and recounts.
Consequently, having been systematically vetted by a history of policymakers, the unanimity and trust of such a physical voting system struggle to scale – being adopted by the 44 nations globally to elect its leaders today.
Don’t people already vote online?
In Switzerland, online voting has been used in several cantons, including Geneva, Zurich, and Neuchatel, increasing voter turnouts up to 4%.
Estonia, another country seen as a pioneer in online voting, introduced the system in 2005. Today, several national elections have been conducted through online voting, including the 2023 Parliamentary elections where 51% cast their votes online.
Indeed in 1997, the US state of Texas added an option of online voting to allow astronaut David Wolf to vote from the Mir Space orbiter. As of the 2024 elections, two American astronauts stuck on the International Space Station cast their ballots from space through electronic systems. Yet in the US, online voting has only been made available for those in special circumstances — not on larger scales.
Cybersecurity & client malware
The obvious obstacle to online voting is preventing client malware on a nationally scaled digital system. While all cyber systems are susceptible to hacking, a national voting system seems particularly attractive. With access to the platform via the cellphone of every American, the sheer scale of the platform opens infinite doors of opportunity for hacker sabotage and silent nudges.
Additionally, online voting is prone to the influence of irrelevant factors, such as internet speed or connection efficacy. For example, the denial of service in a certain area, whether due to malicious hacking or simply rainy weather, could generate serious ramifications for election accuracy. Importantly, there is no way to measure the degree to which online voters were affected by internet traffic nor if such slowdowns have been deliberately manipulated by other actors, fostering greater disorganization in already chaotic elections.
User identification & coercion
But how is voting online different from online banking and texts? The answer stems from our need for voter choices to be secretive. While no law prohibits citizens from sharing who they voted for with others, regulations forbid the sharing of the physical ballot via picturing or other forms of social media to eliminate voter choices under coercion or briberies.
However, “the very idea that keeps our ballots secret has created the problem of user confirmation,” notes Dr. Josh Benaloh, senior cryptographer at Microsoft, in a YouTube interview with Cleo Abram.
In Estonia, governments avoid coercion by allowing voters to recast votes for unlimited times, with only the last vote being counted. However, Estonian voters are identified using their national ID cards, a system uniquely lacking in the US.
Regardless, even if voters can be sufficiently identified, the risks of election scamming go beyond national borders, where efforts to flip one vote can equate to the effort to flip a million.
Public trust
Complications of online voting transcend technology. The challenge of acquiring public trust is essential for online systems to overcome in becoming a potential alternative to our historical physical methods.
For centuries, mathematicians and policymakers have doubted the fairness behind our electoral systems. Duverger’s law highlights the rationality of “first-past-the-post” as paradoxical in a scenario of three or more alternative parties: as a vote for the less popular third party may simply enhance the success of the least favorite party, voters are incentivized to vote strategically, resulting in the concentration of power in two parties, reflecting the eventual two-party system we see in the modern U.S. Electoral College. Various other limitations were cemented by Arrow’s Nobel-Prize-winning Impossibility Theorem, mathematically proving the impossibility of satisfying the five necessary conditions of rational voting in multi-party elections.
Ultimately, trust in the agency of voting systems is an important factor that affects citizens’ intention to vote online. While the way we vote will adapt with the rapid transformations of data and science, the need to remain politically engaged is unchanged — being one of the few ways individuals can directly contribute to the greater cause of their democracies.
Written by Julia Jiang
