Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/2001269.2001281
Inside Risks
Modernizing the Danish
Democratic Process

ON MARCH 3, 2009 the Ger- man Supreme Court de- cided that the use of elec- tronic voting machines in parliamentary elections is unconstitutional as long as it is not possible for citizens to exercise their right to inspect and verify the essential steps of the election. The verdict did not rule voting machines unconstitutional, but the particular election law that legitimized their use during the 2005 election. Electronic elections, like any traditional election, must be under public control. And as this has not been achieved yet, the Supreme Court decision effectively outlawed the use of e-voting machines for German parliamentary elections, at least for now.

 

photographs by JørgeN WeiNreich MalteseN

european e-Voting initiatives One might think that events as such would have slowed down the efforts of other European nations to push e-voting technology into polling stations or even homes. This, however, is not the case. Many European countries are newly invigorated, running experiments with voter registration, vote casting, and vote tallying. Switzerland, a direct democracy, legalized Internet elections in 2009. Norway used a newly developed online voting system for its parliamentary elections on September 12, 2011. In 2005, Estonians were the first permitted to vote from their homes, using their national ID cards and off-the-shelf smartcard readers

copenhagen election workers empty a ballot box containing votes cast during the June 7, 2009 election for the european Parliament.

connected to their computers to authenticate themselves.

But why would governments advo-
cate this kind of technology, risking de-
cades of democratic achievements, in
what seemingly contradicts common
sense? There is more to this discussion
than meets the eye. Governments and
administrations currently revisit for-
mer decisions on how to implement
the voting process and view them in
the new light of information technol-
ogy. Modern mobile devices such as
smartphones, for example, interact
and tinker with the very assumptions
that secret and free elections are built
upon. Off-the-shelf scanning technol-
ogy can be used to identify individual
sheets of paper simply by the compo-
sition of their fibers. It is also easy to
take and transmit a photo or even a live
video of the vote-casting process. Euro-
pean nations are pushing forward with
the adoption of electronic and even
Internet voting architectures, because
their governments feel the risks of stay-
ing with the status quo outweigh the
risks associated with modernizing the
democratic process. I believe these Eu-
ropean initiatives are healthy, neces-
sary, and natural. The evolution of the
democratic process must not come to