Online voting 'no silver bullet' for low turnout, study finds
Thursday, 13 December 2018
Electronic voting is widely regarded as insecure and might not do much to help improve voter turnout, a new study suggests.
The study published by Auckland University of Technology said online voting was 'superficially attractive' but international evidence suggested it was not a silver bullet for reversing declining voter turnout.
A trial of electronic voting planned for next year's local council elections was scrapped by Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ) on Wednesday.
But it is 'never say die' for the trial's backers who hope to have another crack in 2022 despite strong criticism of the idea from many technology experts.
**READ MORE:
* Online voting trial for 2019 elections scrapped
* Councils warned electronic voting will not be secure
* Online voting no cure for apathy, says academic**
LGNZ shelved its trial planned for nine council elections on cost grounds, rather than because of security concerns.
It said it had found an unnamed vendor that satisfied all of its security and delivery requirements, but could not justify the $4.2 million cost of the trial.
Working party spokeswoman Marguerite Delbet said it was 'hugely disappointed that the trial won't proceed at next year's local body elections', but LGNZ said it now hoped to run a trial in 2022.
The Auckland University of Technology study twists the knife, however.
Despite LGNZ's claim to have found a 'secure' system, the study noted that 'most IT security experts believe online voting cannot be secure'.
Elections in Switzerland and Belgium suggested online voting could have a 'novelty effect' that gave a short-term boost to voter turnout, author Julienne Molineaux, head of the university's policy observatory, said.
But evidence of a wider impact on voter turnout was 'inconsistent', she said.
'There is no increase in youth turnout when online voting is adopted' and young people did not appear to prefer online voting over a paper ballot, when given the choice, the study found.
There was general agreement that online voting was a good option for the disabled and for overseas voting, Molineaux said.
A landmark two-year study led by the combined US national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine, Securing the Vote: Protecting US democracy, concluded in September that US elections should only be held using paper ballots, because of the security risks of online voting.
Waikato University cyber-security expert Ryan Ko, who has been researching how to improve online voting systems, also warned in September that existing commercial systems were not as secure as postal voting.
LGNZ officials had been working closely with the New South Wales Electoral Commission whose own e-voting system, supplied by Spanish company Scytl, has been under review in the wake of security concerns.
The NSW government has been using a system called iVote to allow blind people to vote in state elections since 2011 and has since extended eligibility to voters who had registered to vote early.
Australian National University professor Rajeev Gore and computer scientist Vanessa Joy told a NSW parliamentary committee in 2016 that they had found a serious security hole in the iVote system used by NSW.
That could have been used to launch 'man in the middle attacks' that could have subverted elections in a way that would not be detectable to the NSW Electoral Commission, they said.
But Delbet said the decline in the postal system was one reason why alternatives needed to continue to be explored.
'With rising postal costs, sections of our communities currently unable to vote privately, and growing disengagement with elections generally, there is simply too much at stake to give up now,' she said in the statement released by LGNZ.
Each council had contributed $15,000 to the working party's work on online voting, with an additional $62,608 from Auckland Council.