Electronic voting has no guarantees for success

Our bet on biometric technology as a means to eliminate fraud and make rigging less likely during voting may be misplaced.

Ingrained in this assertion is an acknowledgement of the complexities that surround the administration and independence of carrying out elections.

I have severally stated that making the distinction between spin and fact during the period leading up to the elections is absolutely paramount.

And the spin doctors that drive our social and political narratives are fully cognisant of the fact that this is the most emotive, anxiety-driven period, as we try our hardest to avoid the chaos and violence that has marred elections in our or neighbouring countries in years past.

Over the past few days, mainstream and social media have been rife with reports of the order to stop the implementation of a civic education programme by a long-functioning non-governmental organisation based on claims of over-stepping its boundaries.

Though I don’t care to debate the legitimacy of these claims, I am interested in seeing how this situation plays out. It will say a whole lot more about what we can expect over the next seven months from our leadership than words ever could.

More importantly though, I’m more interested in understanding the electoral process, why automating systems is not necessarily the silver bullet to our election woes and the significance of non-system issues like vote buying and voter intimidation.

These non-system issues are precisely the reasons why civic education is an inalienable right of citizens in nations seeking free will and democracy.

After the 2007 elections and the ensuing chaos, we implemented what we thought was a state-of-the-art and tamper-proof electronic voting system for 2013. Results would be transmitted, on a real-time basis, through text messages via a server consolidating over 33,000 centres. But for a system that was considered infallible, the very aspects we thought tamper-proof broke down as soon as they were put to the test.

The server became overloaded, biometric kits entrusted with scanning thumbprint broke down, election operators’ PIN numbers and passwords were forgotten.

The end result - centres reverted to hand-counting ballots, which led to a significantly delayed announcement. I recall the mood that the country was in as we waited for the wins and losses to be announced.

We were afraid and anxious, willing for the country not to descend into the anarchy that led to 2007’s bloodshed and violence, the effects of which hundreds of Kenyans are still, to date, dealing with.

Contrary to popularly held opinion on the legitimacy and reliability of electronic voting, public policy analysts worldwide, and especially in developed countries, have come to the conclusion that the system can be unreliable at best and dangerous at worst. Now, I am not for a moment asking that we fully revert to a manual system. However, the confidence around electronic voting seems to be driven more by perception than proof.

The intention of biometric systems is to ensure that registers are not manipulated, whether via ghost voters or multiple votes and therefore deliver a credible and clean election. However, for full effectiveness to be achieved, there are certain parameters that must be in place.

More than twenty countries in Africa have attempted to run an election via an electronic or biometric element, and most of them have failed for various reasons.

In Nigeria, some electronic fingerprint readers failed, therefore unable to verify identities, not least of which was the incumbent’s. There was a fifty minute wait before he was able to vote, a damning indictment of the electoral system. In Ghana’s 2012 election, voting extended to the second day after biometric kits failed in some parts of the country.

In the 2012 US election, 56 per cent of voters cast paper ballots which were then optically scanned while 39 per cent used e-voting. In Europe, out of 8 countries that experimented with e-voting, 6 reverted back to paper ballots and by 2014, only 2 European countries had fully instituted electronic ballots.

Closer to home in Kenya, the electronic tallying system and biometric issues were linked in part to electricity issues in polling stations. According to reports, in Nigeria voters were asked to wash their hands as dirt and oil could have caused less accuracy in electronic fingerprint recognition.

Other reasons are much complex. Some reports point to wilful negligence during the flawed procurement process. By far, the fundamental problem around using electronic systems for voting has been cited as opacity, inability to conclusively verify that votes or operating software are free of manipulation and the vulnerability to glitches.

That's why some countries are wary of e-voting systems. Bigger non-system issues include ballot buying, voter intimidation and post-election violence, which cannot be eliminated by automating voting.

That we are buying into the narrative starting to play out – suppressing freedom of information is only the tip of the iceberg. The spin machinery is in full motion and this story will get worse before it gets better, if at all.