Let’s Hear It For Up-Close-And-Personal, Hard-Copy Democracy!

The Best Way: Missing from the on-line voting debate is any reference to the voting system that produces turn-out figures ranging from 77 to 93 percent of registered voters. The voting system used to collect and count the votes cast in our parliamentary elections. The system that involves citizens making their way to a polling station, marking their ballot-papers privately in a polling-booth, and then depositing them personally in a sealed ballot-box.

WHY ARE RETURNING OFFICERS coming out so strongly for on-line voting? Of all the people in the world willing to advocate for a system of voting so absurdly vulnerable to interference and corruption, returning officers should be the very last. And yet, all week, as fears of a record low voter turnout in this latest round of local government elections have grown, it is returning officers who are among the keenest to give on-line voting a try.

The curious fact about this clamour for on-line voting is that its proponents are offering it as a cure for declining voter participation. Young people, notorious for their poor record for joining-in the democratic process, are seen as the group most likely to benefit from this supposed panacea. Missing from the debate, however, is the voting system that produces turn-out figures ranging from 77 to 93 percent of registered voters. The voting system used to collect and count the votes cast in our parliamentary elections. The one that involves citizens making their way to a polling station, marking their ballot-papers privately in a polling-booth, and then depositing them personally in a sealed ballot-box.

This was, after all, the way New Zealanders used to vote in local body elections. Why was it abandoned? Ironically, because voter turn-out was falling, and it was thought that allowing people to fill out their ballot papers at home, over a fortnight, and then pop them in the post, would make the whole process easier, less stressful and more efficient. Predictably, there was a slight up-tick in electoral participation, followed by another slow decline in voter numbers.

Interestingly, the obvious weaknesses in postal voting were never taken particularly seriously by its proponents. That it essentially did away with the idea that casting a vote was something every citizen had a right to do, alone, in a polling-booth, where they could be safe from the influence of husbands, wives, other family members, and (thinking once again of younger voters) flatmates, was not considered a serious enough defect to rule postal voting out of contention.

The thought that a domineering husband and/or authoritarian mother might commandeer their family’s voting papers and cast them all themselves never appears to have crossed the reformers’ minds. Nor, apparently, the possibility that a flat full of apathetic youngsters might simply invite the one member of the household interested in politics to cast their votes for them.

Exactly the same indifference to the possibility that an election’s final outcome may not be an accurate reflection of the electorate’s will is noticeable in the campaigners for on-line voting.

Similar indifference has been shown by those in charge of the 2019 local government elections to the steadily declining efficacy of the New Zealand Post Office. When postal voting was introduced in 1992, the Internet was largely restricted to boffins and geeks. The mail was delivered on every day of the week except Sunday, and a posted letter could travel from one end of the country to the other more-or-less overnight. Over the course of the last 27 years, however, the time taken for a letter to reach its addressee has increased from one or two days to approximately a week. Likewise, the time taken for ballot papers to be delivered and returned. It will be interesting to discover how many 2019 ballot papers, posted no later than 5 days out from the vote-count (as advised) nevertheless arrive after mid-day on Saturday, 12 October. Since NZ Post no longer date stamps letters, it will be impossible to sort out which ballot papers should be counted and which disallowed. There is a real possibility that hundreds – perhaps thousands – of citizens will end up being disenfranchised by New Zealand’s sclerotic postal service.

The nation’s returning officers will, of course, object that anyone who forgets to post their ballot papers can always deposit them by hand in one of the ballot boxes situated in the local library and at the town hall. In other words, to overcome the growing challenges associated with running an efficient postal voting system, our returning officers have set up what are effectively polling-booths to cater for the stragglers.

Honestly, it’s enough to make you wonder why we just don’t admit that postal-voting, never a particularly good idea, has failed, and return to the original – and by far the most secure – method of discovering the electorate’s will. It could hardly be worse than the present system, and it certainly beats the heck out of sending your vote into the void of cyberspace, where neither you – nor the returning officers of the nation – have the slightest notion of where it has been sent, what happened to it there, and on whose behalf, before it ends up as a configuration of pixels blinking mindlessly on some private-sector contractor’s computer screen.

Stealing a hard-copy election is surprisingly difficult and very hard to hide. Stealing an on-line election, however, is a much easier proposition. If it’s done properly, no one but the people who paid for the hack will ever know.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 10 October 2019.

Online Voting? Not If You Value Democracy!

And Where It Goes Nobody Knows: Security issues aside, Online Voting strikes at the inescapably collectivist character of the democratic process. Reducing the act of voting to the electronic identification of a purely individual preference replaces the active "us" of participatory democracy with the crass solipsism of reality television and The X Factor.

 

DEREK HANDLEY bubbles over with faith in the future. As a precocious inductee to the Silicon Alley Hall of Fame, he is blazingly confident that capitalism, information technology and the entrepreneurial spirit are never going to encounter a challenge they cannot rise to – or overcome.

 

Like the failure of close to half of New Zealand citizens aged under 30 to engage in the electoral process.

 

On this subject Mr Handley is typically forthright:

 

“Everybody under 30 has grown up with the internet and mobile devices to do practically everything online yet they still can’t vote online. [This has resulted] in an entire generation being pushed to the sidelines of democracy not because they don’t care, but because it hasn’t kept up with them.”

 

Setting aside Mr Handley’s bubbly confidence in all things “online”, this is utter tosh. An “entire generation” has not been “pushed to the sidelines of democracy”, they have ambled there entirely of their own accord. Not only do they not “care” about democracy, but an alarming number of them would also struggle to tell you what it is.

 

Far from democracy failing to keep up with the needs of the younger generation, one out of every two New Zealanders under 30 has failed conspicuously to keep up with the most fundamental facts of political life.

 

The most important of these is that politics (and elections) are activities to be participated in collectively – not individually. The moment this central fact of political life is forgotten, the logic of participation collapses in on itself.

 

A recent article by Fairfax journalists Paul Easton and Simon Day vividly illustrates what happens when the prospect of casting a vote is viewed through an individualistic, as opposed to a collectivist, lens.

 

Asked why he didn’t vote, Johnny, aged 20, and described simply as “dad”, declared:

 

“I didn’t see the point. My life is good as it is. I don’t like John Key, but I thought he was going to get in anyway so I didn’t vote. I would vote if it meant getting stuff I was keen for.”

 

Would anyone vote, I wonder, if they looked at their ballot paper in this way? Unless the respective political blocs were registering 50.000 percent to 50.000 percent, what possible difference could the casting of a single ballot ever make?

 

As for the naked appeal to self-enrichment: in which democracy is turned into one of those “goody-bags” that public relations firms and party hostesses pass out; it is difficult to conceive of a sentence which sums up more succinctly the tragically distorted values of Mr Handley’s side-lined generation.

 

Hey Kids! Want stuff that your keen for? Just slide your ballot paper into this box. See? Easy-peasy! Have a nice day!

 

Would digitising the process, as Mr Handley urges, solve the problem? Of course not. If anything, it would make it worse.

 

Online Voting represents the ultimate step towards individualising – and hence trivialising and debasing – the collective act of voting in elections. Even more than it does now, the conduct of politics would come to resemble a television show. The nation’s political future would be decided by a slightly less revved-up version of The X Factor. (With Mike Hosking playing the part of Simon Cowell!)

 

But, of course, the “kids” would soon get bored. The contestants would be too old, too ugly and too serious to hold their attention for more than one “season” of the “show” – if that. Having sampled the “Politics” app, and been disappointed, they’d move on to something more exciting – like “Tinder”.

 

Which means, Mr Handley, that it would all have been for nothing. Whatever slight upward tick in participation the initial introduction of Online Voting might produce would soon dissipate – just as the “beneficial” effects of Postal Voting all-too-rapidly faded away.

 

Even worse, we would have traded a system of voting that is admirably secure and extremely difficult to subvert (without “the fix” very quickly becoming obvious) for a system that could be hacked into as easily as the “Guardians of Peace” hacked into the hard-drives of Sony Pictures. The crucial difference being that we’d never know it had happened.

 

That five minute stroll to the nearest polling-booth every three years is one of the very few opportunities for meaningful civic engagement still available to New Zealanders. The sight of black and white, women and men, old and young collectively determining the future of their nation never fails to move me to tears. Because those people, my fellow citizens, are not voting for themselves, or for “stuff” they might be “keen for”. They know that their single ballot paper will not, of itself, make very much difference. But that’s not the point. The point is that out of the great and mysterious gestalt of democracy a decision emerges – and it is ours.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 6 January 2014.

Low Turnout Won’t Be Fixed By “Online Voting”

Hackers To The Rescue? Professor J. Alex Halderman (second from right) and his merry band of hackers showed just how vulnerable online voting is to outside interference. According to Halderman, "it’s going to be decades, if ever, before we’re able to vote online securely".

 

THE JUNIOR WOODCHUCKS GUIDEBOOK was one of the comic-book artist’s, Carl Barks’, most prescient gags. Whenever the hapless Donald Duck’s adventures with his three nephews and his squillionaire Uncle Scrooge went awry, it was to this extraordinarily handy little book that Huey, Dewey and Louie – Woodchucks all – invariably turned. You’ve fallen from a plane without a parachute? Need a quick course in basic Lizard? Want to know how to lull a dragon to sleep? Then - quick! Consult The Junior Woodchuck Guidebook!

 

For those of you wondering what a Junior Woodchuck might be: they are Carl Barks’ gentle send-up of the American scouting movement. What makes the master comic-book storyteller’s creation of The Junior Woodchucks Guidebook so prescient, however, is that in 2013, nearly 60 years after its first appearance in 1954, practically everyone carries the equivalent of the Woodchucks’ Guidebook in their pocket.

 

Our smartphones, with their connection to the Internet and its vast, inexhaustible search-engines, can now transform us, just about instantly, into experts on just about everything. Who needs The Junior Woodchucks Guidebook when they’ve got “Google”?

 

This increasing reliance on the Internet and its wonders is worrying. Carl Barks may have relied upon The Junior Woodchucks Guidebook to get himself and his cartoon creations out of innumerable tight spots, but we would be extremely unwise to do the same.

 

Writers, dramatists and comic-book storytellers are allowed to bring in a deus ex machina to keep the narrative moving along, but politicians and administrators have no such licence. Though we might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, the conduct of democratic elections is not the stuff of comic-books or classical Greek tragedies.

 

And yet we are subjected to constant claims from politicians, challenged to “do something” about the declining participation-rate in national and local government elections, that the solution lies “online”.

 

This is what the Mayor of New Zealand’s largest city, Len Brown, told reporters on Saturday after being re-elected by barley a third of Auckland’s eligible voters:

 

“We will do online voting next time, there is no doubt about that. I think that maybe postal voting has had its day. People really don’t do much in the way of sending mail anymore.”

 

Not a good idea, Len, as a moment’s consultation of your electronic Junior Woodchucks Guide would have told you.

 

According to the Professor of Computer Science specialising in cyber-security at the University of Michigan, J. Alex Halderman, putting the electoral process online would be extremely risky:

 

“In order to vote online safely, we’re going to have to solve some of the hardest problems in computer security. How do you secure servers against remote attackers? How do you secure people’s home computers against spyware? How do you prevent people from being tricked into visiting the wrong website and giving away their passwords? All of these things are subjects of active research, but it’s probably going to be many, many years until we solve them. That’s why I think it’s going to be decades, if ever, before we’re able to vote online securely.”

 

And Professor Halderman knows what he’s talking about, because three years ago he and three of his top computer science graduates successfully (and perfectly legally) hacked into an online election pilot set up by the District of Columbia’s Board of Education.

 

The Board, supremely confident that their online voting system was secure, cockily challenged anyone who thought they could hack into their software to go ahead and give it a try. Professor Halderman’s team more than rose to the challenge. Not only did they successfully hack the Board’s system, but they also made sure that the test election was “won” by “writing in” the fictional robot anti-hero, Bender, from Fox-TV’s animated sci-fi series Futurama. (The runners-up were HAL from 2001 – A Space Odyssey and the Master Control Programme from Tron.)

 

Those wishing to learn more about Professor Halderman’s slam-dunk demonstration of the dangers of online voting should watch the YouTube video – just search “Hacking the Washington DC Internet voting system”. I would heartily recommend that Mayor Len Brown treat himself to repeated viewings.

 

And before all the computer geeks out there respond with the example of Estonia: permit me to point out that the Estonian on-line voting system relies upon the fact that every Estonian citizen is required to carry an identity card bearing a unique identity number. Personally, I’m not so sure that New Zealanders are ready for mandatory identification cards. Not after all that passionate debate over the GCSB surveillance legislation. But, I could be wrong.

 

The other problem with Estonia is this: if the Estonian government decided to elect its own “Bender” – who would know?

 

Online voting, warns Professor Halderman, is no different from any other system reliant upon computer software. (Novopay? WINZ? ACC?) “Small mistakes” can lead to “huge problems.”

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 15 October 2013.