2 - The History of electronic voting |
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2 THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC VOTING |
2.1 Background |
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Social development needs time. Early in the last quarter of the 20th century there existed very few "electronic voting" projects that concerned electronic democracy. After a slow start, however, the situation at the turn of the century changed dramatically showing an explosion in the number of such projects.
But, as remarked, not so long before, in the 1970s, this was not the case. Personal information processing was rare, almost exotic. And computerized collection of opinions was scarce. The many online opinion polls and democratic experiments at the beginning of the new century therefore should be put in perspective. How did it all start?
2.2 The concept of online voting |
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Electronic voting usually refers to definition, collection and dissemination of peoples´ opinions, with the help of some machinery that is more or less computer supported. The voting process is closely connected to the deliberation, the dialogue process among the participants where all the voting alternatives are considered. Electronic democracy is a broader concept that embraces more than the voting process as such.
Systems for online voting usually have been given the shape of general communication systems, where voting is one out of many functions. Voting is an integrated activity in a deliberation process where people get together to form a common opinion. Therefore, online voting normally is more of a general activity rather than a specific one.
As was remarked, systems for automated voting in electronic democracy are comparatively recent. A few examples make this clear. In 1955, Erich Froom described a situation where members of groups at distributed face-to-face meetings would communicate with "the help of technical devices", summarizing the collected opinions of the participants. The first generally available, computer supported voting system likely was the Delphi panel that Murray Turoff implemented in 1970 (the EMISARI system, see section 2.4; note that the Delphi method is a standard sociological method). This turned out to be the beginning of the development of "computer conferencing". That same year, Hazel Henderson wrote about "new ways of improving communication channels to inform the voter, and machinery to channel his or her participation and "feedback".
The same concept was discussed by the legendary R Buckminster Fuller in 1971. He talked about "electrified voting" in a theoretical, ideally democratic world. That same year, and independently, Tomas Ohlin described a system where every home would have a computer terminal connected and hooked into huge databases, and where citizens through large panels could participate in the public decision making [3].
These were visions. As usual, at the time of their publications, most of them were not taken seriously by the general public. However, as technology developed and the generality of its use matured, the prerequisites for voting networks increasingly came to be apparent. Once that had happened, it did not take long until practical experiments appeared. At first these concerned offline voting.
2.3 Offline electronic voting |
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The history of offline electronic voting began with the necessity to install secret balloting in the USA at the end of the 19th century. Secret balloting in the United States was first done in 1888 on a printed paper ballot. A few years later the voting machines appeared. In 1869, Thomas A. Edison proposed to record and count the votes cast by Congressmen by electromechanical machines. These devices were not intended to be used by the public, but it was, nevertheless, the first workable voting machine proposed for use in the United States.
Nearly twenty years after Edison's patent and years after the first secret balloting, Jacob H. Myers, at Rochester, New York, developed and built a mechanical voting machine for public use to "protect mechanically the voters from fraud, and make the process of casting the ballot perfectly plain, simple and secret". In April 15, 1892, this device was first used in the United States, in a town meeting in Lockport, New York. Mr. Myers continued to develop and improve his device and, in 1895, a company was formed in Jamestown, New York, to manufacture this machine.
Computers were first introduced to tabulate votes in the early 1960s.Voting machines, which utilized primitive, punch card computer processing came into widespread use in the 1960s in the USA.
In the 1960s it was believed that definition and collection of opinions primarily was to be carried out with the help of dedicated machines. It was anticipated that some kind of "readers" were to be made available at frequently visited places, to make the "voting" easy.
Some of these voting machines were constructed to be used offline, others were to be connected to networks that in the beginning usually were centralized.
A number of offline machines were invented. Several of them used punched cards, a form that from the 1960s and up through the 1980s was a dominating medium for data storage. The use of this medium was partly motivated by cost, there were large quantities of punched card reader technology available in many countries, at low cost. Manufacturing of card based personal opinion collectors was easy. By the early 1960s, at numerous elections, it has been estimated that over 50% of voters in the United States cast their ballots on mechanical voting machines.
Throughout the 1980s serious questions were raised about both the accuracy of the vote tabulating programs and the vulnerability of the system to undetectable manipulation. Many of the criticisms were dismissed with cries of "sour grapes on the part of losing candidates". Human errors, procedural errors or innocent glitches in the programs were usually identified as the sources of the problems. There was no comprehensive or independent investigation done to gather all the facts and ask the right questions. What has been proven, however, is that vote tabulating programs do contain errors.
As technology for optical scanning became available on the market, in the 70s, this was believed to be a major interface advancement for voting. However, many of these machines showed a lack of mechanical perfection, and it was only the later machine versions that could show real ease of use. In the 1990s, these machines had been developed to be very efficient, but at that time online technology - with touch screen or computer keyboard interfaces - had arrived to be a main systems competitor. Optical scanning did not get the chance to really take off for this type of applications.
Offline electronic voting often was carried out with only limited amounts of result analysing capacity. Since the early voting machines were rather "unintelligent", the possibility to draw summarized conclusions in the beginning was limited. However, this increased rapidly, as the cost for adding computer processing power decreased. Subsequently, quite soon the voting machines became more "intelligent", and the power to draw analytic conclusions, as well as the number of forms to present results, increased.
In 1984, Illinois (USA) began a systematic and exhaustive test of the vote counting systems used in the state. Tabulating errors in the programs were found in 28% of the systems that were tested. According to Michael Harty, the person in charge of the testing, nobody seemed to care. Many court cases involving allegations of frauds were brought against vendors of electronic voting systems. There were no convictions. Was there ever any proof of tampering presented? No. Part of the reason for this may be that during the litigation the plaintiffs were never given access to the vote tabulating programs, and hence there was no opportunity for anyone to establish evidence to either prove or disprove the allegations.
In 1995 electronic voting has been experimented with in Belgium, first in a pilot project, and afterwards generalized to half of the constituencies. In order to have a better voting count, voters vote with a magnetic card they introduce in a computer. This system allows to automatically centralize votes and to verify the results with the cards voters give back at the end of their vote. The French company Bull provided the technology. The April 11, 1994 law has introduced the electronic voting system. The senators Alain Destexhe and Vincent Van Quickenborne are currently making a proposal at the Belgium assembly in order to complete this 1994 law and to transform the electronic voting system into an Internet voting system. Drawing on the US experiences, their goal is to introduce Internet voting system in Belgium.
From the presidential election in the US in the year 2000, it has become evident that card oriented machines were used for what would likely be the last time. The experiences from this election show that the interest in more modern machinery is increasing rapidly.
2.4 The early online systems |
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As was mentioned above, Murray Turoff in 1970 developed a computer supported Delphi panel. This system made it possible for the users to:
· view all new discussion items entered by users
· vote on any or all of the discussion items
· view all types of voting results
This Delphi system was further developed, and generalized, into a computer conferencing system called EMISARI (Emergency Management Information and Reference Index). This was ready in 1972. Here, voting was made even more easy. The system had a human coordinator, and among its early applications were regional policy making and service planning. This system showed the way for the pioneering computer conferencing system EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System). This was running from 1975 all into the 1990s, and was used for research and development and for development of new educational methods in the New Jersey area in the US. Among its important applications were expanded forms of group communication and opinion polling with flexible large groups of users.
Discussing these early experiences with the pioneers themselves makes it clear that these people often were met by non-understanding. This lack of support from the environment nearby often was problematic.
At the Institute for the Future, San Francisco, USA, Jaques Vallee and Robert Johansen in 1973 had developed a system called FORUM. This was a structured Delphi-like network system that handled messages and voting in many flexible forms. A simplified version, called PLANET, was exported to Sweden in 1975, to be used in the TERESE project [4], one of the first experiments in the area of public use and socially conscious application of computerized conferencing including voting. FORUM and PLANET later were studied in many application oriented projects in the US where social understanding and opinion collecting were in focus.
The PLANET system served as a model for the subsequently developed KOM system, implemented in the late 1970s by Jacob Palme and Torgny Tholerus. KOM was used as a main communications medium in several EU supported projects in the 1980s. This system was inspired by the EIES computer conferencing system, the legendary system where the pioneers Murray Turoff and Starr Roxanne Hiltz further refined social communications experiences.
These systems were network systems, many of them containing numerous flexible user functions, of which voting was an important one.
There were also early systems containing voting that were connected mainly to in some sense "interactive" television. In 1973, an ETM (Electronic Town Meeting) was organized in New York, where a Regional Plan Association collected the opinions of large groups of New Yorkers in urban regional planning matters. However, main parts of this activity relied on TV and telephone, used in separate parts of the project. Therefore, it only to some extent resembled use of "electronic voting". More complete interactive television experiments continued a few years later, among others in 1976 in a by the National Science Foundation and New York University funded project in Berks Community. Here, elderly citizens were given the opportunity to vote on matters of common interest through two-way TV. It can be questioned, however, if experiments of this type are to be referred to under the heading of electronic voting.
2.5 Voting with the Minitel |
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The French Minitel was another pioneering example of early online technology. This system was well suited for such applications that contained collection and calculation of text (for instance citizens´ opinions), and was, in fact, used by many for procedures similar to voting during the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. The Minitel was not a piece of equipment that was dedicated to a certain application. On the contrary, it was a general-purpose computer terminal, a piece of so-called unintelligent technology, used for online applications. By "unintelligence" it was meant that it contained no computer processing capacity of its own.
The Minitel, connected to the network Télétel (based on the packet switching network Transpac), was created in the late 1970s, and was first inaugurated in 1981. The terminal "would cost no more than 700 FRF", and was developed by four French companies (among them Matra), and was distributed for free over France. It was rented by its users, and the use of it paid its cost.
The Minitel reached a penetration of 7 million units, at its peak use. This at the time was the world's most frequently used general-purpose online machine and was in many cases used for discussion and subsequent voting. As a matter of fact, the quantities of time that it was used for communication between human beings took many by surprise. Its creators thought that the system to a dominating degree would be used for commercial applications, but it soon turned out that its use came to be dominated by two other application types. It was used for:
· the annuaire électronique (the electronic phone book)
· the personal communication between users (e-mail)
· the kiosks (different financial levels for public and private use)
Quite early the Minitel was used for public applications, distribution of public information and dialogues with and between users. These types of use contained several types of voting.
2.6 Televote systems |
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The online oriented systems discussed above most often were developed by and originated from computer science experts. Another early creative line of development originated from the political science field.
Already from 1973 Ned Crosby in Minnesota, US, organized "citizen juries" of participants, getting together on common opinions through the use of administrative machinery that became more and more computer supported. Peter Dienel in Wuppertal, Germany, organized "Planungszelle" with the same aim.
The original Televote projects were inspired by Vincent Campbell, who in 1974 organized at San Jose, US, a regional citizen participation project where "Televoters" would discuss local planning issues and vote through a telephone connected system.
At Hawaii University, the inspired researchers Ted Becker and Christa Slaton planned and organized from 1978 deliberative Televote projects that collected the opinions of panels with hundreds of participants. In 1981, they coined the term "teledemocracy". They have since then continued to refine the methods of using increasingly computer supported deliberative processes combined with voting as elements of democratic decision making.
Ever since the beginning of the 1980s, increasing numbers of computerized voting projects have been introduced, adding up to a situation where voting is turning out to be an extremely common activity, both in private and public environments. Its use is increasingly being placed close to real decision-making.
In 1994, the birth of the World Wide Web created a change of paradigm regarding the evolution of Internet voting systems.
Since the middle of the 1990's governments and political parties became aware of the role Internet could play in public life and in elections. Many studies and projects were done all over the world.
2.7 Examples of Internet voting elections progress since 1995 |
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Since 1996 Brazilian citizens are able to actually cast their ballots electronically. Even if it is not an Internet voting system, this is the beginning of this kind of system. The voter uses an electronic voting device that, for each office, displays the choices and prompts him/her for his/her vote. During the 1998's elections, over sixty million Brazilian voters - 57 percent of the voting population - voted electronically in elections for local, state and national offices. The technology was provided by the French company BULL. In January 2000, a Brazilian network security company has signed a contract with the US company Safevote that will give Brazilians the first opportunity to cast ballots over the Internet during the next year's Federal Election.
In 1996, in the USA, the Reform Party became the first US political party to use Internet voting (along with telephone and postal mail voting) to select a Presidential candidate. Over 2000 voters voted via the Internet.
The year 1997 represents the introduction of electronic voting in Germany. The city of Cologne decided to introduce electronic voting. Two pilot projects in 1998 and 1999 have been run during the Federal legislative Elections and the European Elections.
For the parliamentary elections of May 2000, electronic voting technology has been extended to all the polling sites of Cologne. Ten other cities from Rheinland-Westfalen have followed this example and used electronic voting machines. During the 1998 trial, the city of Cologne sounded out 1750 voters using the electronic voting system about their experience. 73% of them found that electronic voting has more advantages than drawbacks, 87% considered the generalization of this system as evident, 70% found electronic voting simpler than traditional voting and 86% found it to be faster, and finally, 75% saw in this process a way to avoid errors in counting the votes.
Germany has also tried out online voting. Two examples are mentioned that were successful but had no legal significance. The first one concerned the Federal legislative election in 1998: a fictive constituency was created on which an Internet voting system simulation permitted to test a vote software package. More than 300,000 net surfers visited the web site and 17,000 participated in this simulation. The second German example took place during the elections of Hamburg's technicians department dealing with health board of directors. Paper ballot was the only vote that counted but it was possible to also vote by Internet without it having a legal value. To these two examples without a real legal significance one more trial with legally binding results can be added.
On 2 and 3 February 2000, online elections of students' representatives of the Osnabrück University took place. Students who wanted to cast their votes online were able to register themselves and then they received a smart card with a 2048-bit electronic signature, a CD-ROM containing the voting software package i-Vote and a smart card reader. The goal was to test the viability of the software and the impact on citizens.
From 1999 onwards the world saw a dramatic increase in both the number and the scope of Internet voting trials.
In June 1999, during the European Elections, seven French cities (Brest, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Paris 16, Pontoise, Bourg-en-Bresse and Marseille) tested electronic voting. The number of concerned voters and the absence of legal significance limited the scope of these tests. A large part of these tests was carried out by the US Company election.com.
In January 2000, in Alaska, more than 3,000 Internet voting registration forms were mailed out to registered voters in Alaska. Several thousand Alaskans living in remote areas would be given the chance to vote in the state's Republican Party elections. Votehere.net, a Washington-based data security firm, organized this election. Of over 4000 votes cast, only 35 came via the Internet. Obviously this was not a success.
In March 2000 the first large-scale binding election to be conducted online in the USA was the 2000 Arizona Democratic primary, in which about 40,000 voters cast their votes over the Internet using a system provided for by election.com. On the total turnout, 41% of votes came from Remote Internet voting, 38% were mailed-in by post, 4,8% came from Internet voting polling place and 16% were paper ballots.
Also in March 2000 the first online elections were realized in France at Issy-les-Moulineaux in order to nominate the members of the Internet surfers Council. Again the system was provided by election.com.
In September 2000 in France, a good example concerns the five-year term referendum in the city of Brest. It was the first time in France voters were allowed to vote by Internet for a public referendum even if there was no legal significance. Election.com organized this Internet voting process. Two types of voting systems were put in place in parallel. Citizens voted with the traditional process and in parallel they were allowed to cast their ballots by Internet. 35% of voters decided to test the Internet voting system. Computers were available in polling sites and voters, after having registered themselves, were given a PIN and a password to have a secured data transaction.
In October 2000, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), i.e., the technical co-ordination body for the Internet, has chosen, through a world-wide online vote using technology of election.com, 5 Directors of the ICANN Board. More than 76,000 Internet users around the world have become At-Large members of ICANN, and were eligible to vote over a 10-day period. ICANN selected election.com to conduct the vote. 34,000 registered members from over the world cast their votes online.
In November 2000, for the US Presidential Elections, voters in three counties of California and Arizona were given the opportunity to cast non-binding online ballots in a public trial of online voting. Votehere.net were associated to this project of non-binding shadow elections, operating in tandem with traditional elections system. Complete election transcripts of the online voting pilots in Sacramento County, San Diego County, and Maricopa County that took place in October and November 2000 were provided to the Secretaries of State in Arizona and California. Voters in San Diego County, California were able to cast non-binding online ballots for the trials at an early voting poll-site from October 23 to October 27. Voters in Sacramento County, California were able to do the same from October 30 through Election Day, November 7. Voters in Maricopa County, Arizona were invited to try online voting at a Phoenix area poll-site during polling hours on November 7. According to Votehere.net, 100% of Arizona voters who tested online voting found it easy or very easy to use, 80% would prefer to vote online and 85% believed the Votehere.net system to be secure.
Another example can be mentioned concerning the US Presidential Elections: two counties of Florida, Okaloosa County and Orange County tested an Internet Voting system for residents living abroad (officers of Air Force, Navy, Army, Marines, Coast Guard). Five American jurisdictions were involved in this project called Voting Over the Internet (VOI): Weber County, Utah, the State of South Carolina, Dallas, Texas, Orange and Okaloosa Counties. This program was sponsored by the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP), an agency of the Amercian Defense Department that was funded by the Congress. The Secretary of Defense is the presidential designee for administrating the federal provisions of the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) of 1986 which covers the voting rights of all members of the Uniformed Services, the merchant marine, and their family members, federal employees overseas civilian citizens not affiliated with the Federal government.
According to Pat Hollarn, responsible of elections in Okaloosa County, over the 496 initial respondents citizens, 139 were eligible at voting time, 91 were registered for the VOI and 84 voted. These 84 e-votes came from 28 States and territories, 12 countries (Europe, Middle East, Far East).
The FVAP was responsible for the installation, testing and training on the hardware and software necessary for the pilot project at the Local Election Offices. To achieve this election through the Internet, the FVAP contracted with a company named BoozAllen Hamilton to develop the software. Because of the FVAP's connection with the Defense Department, they were able to use the military Internet system, as well as their security (encryption, digital certificates, etc). Each of the five jurisdictions who participated in the project had their own Internet provider. The Local Election Office administered the system and processed voting materials. The FVAP provided a central server for the secure transmission of voting materials from citizens to local election officials and vice versa. The server maintained an audit trail of all transmissions but did not store voter information.
Volunteers were solicited from all the Uniformed Services. The volunteers had to meet the UOCAVA absentee voting requirements of one of the participating jurisdictions and have access to an IBM-compatible PC and the Internet. A "Citizen Information Packet" was provided containing the citizen's software with complete instructions on how to load it and use the pilot system. Once the citizen was connected to the system, he or she only needed to follow the instructions on the screen.
Volunteers were given Department of Defense Public Key Infrastructure certificates. The certificates were used to identify them to the Federal Voting Assistance Program server and submitted a digitally signed, completed electronic Federal Post Card Application. That application was forwarded directly to the Local Election Office Server. Once the ballots were available and the citizen requested a ballot, the Local Election Office Server transmitted an electronic version of the appropriate ballot through the FVAP Server to the citizen. The voted electronic ballot information was encrypted and sent through a Secure Socket Layer. The VOI system was equipped with filtering routers, Intrusion Detection Systems and specially configured operating systems to safeguard unauthorized system penetration. All data transfers associated with the pilot used the SSL protocol.
On October 11 and 12, 2000 the Internet Policy Institute along with the University of Maryland conducted a workshop on Internet voting, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, examining the feasibility of online voting. Their findings and recommendations for research are contained in a report published in March 2001 [2]. It concludes that Internet voting from polling places is likely to feasible in the near term and Internet voting from kiosks may be possible, but remote Internet voting from homes or offices should not be used for public elections on a wide scale until many very challenging technical and social science issues are resolved.
In November-December 2000, the aftermath of the US Presidential Elections clearly showed the limitations of the current voting process and reinforced the debate on Internet voting. Without any doubt electronic voting is here to stay.
