Design Alternatives to the Ballot Box Voting System Anthony Crabbe
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Design Alternatives to the Ballot Box Voting System Anthony Crabbe Introduction Western democracy has always been an idea dependent on the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/29/3/75/1715207/desi_a_00222.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 design of physical systems that enable citizen participation in deci- sion-making. Athenian citizens of the fifth century BCE helped implement Kleisthenes’s new system of governance by dropping tokens indicating either “for” or “against” into amphorae, which could be emptied and their contents counted publicly to ascertain the majority’s decision.1 That original design still persists in most democracies today, where the most noticeable physical difference is that paper ballots and lockable boxes replace tokens and jars. A more significant system difference is that public balloting today is used primarily for the election of governmental representatives and the political parties to which they belong. This party political (or “representative”) system of democracy is often called the “Westminster” system, after the customs and practices of British parliaments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In marked contrast, the original Athenian democracy was a “direct” one, in which all major policies were decided by a popular ballot, rather than a restricted ballot within the boule (i.e., the standing council of 500 regional representatives, and the forerunner of pres- ent-day congresses). Moreover, members of the boule and the legis- lature were not voted into office. They were citizens selected by lot, using an ingeniously designed lottery device, carved from stone and called a kleroterion.2 Thus, any notion that the Westminster system had revived 1 Aristotle, Constitution of Athens and the principles and values of Athenian democracy was a fanciful Related Texts, trans. Kurt von Fritz and conceit of British parliamentarians, who had only really created a Ernst Kapp (New York: Hafner, 1974), 145-47. system for deciding which of their various factions could take a 2 Sterling Dow, Aristotle, the Kleroteria, fixed period turn at governing the nation. As British Lord Chancel- and the Courts, in “Athenian Democracy,” lor Quintin Hogg suggested in 1976, their Westminster system ed. P. J. Rhodes (Oxford University Press, might better be described as an “elective dictatorship,”3 in which 2004), 62-95. citizens play no role other than to decide which individual should 3 Quintin Hogg, Elective Dictatorship, represent their locality inside an institution that Dickens charac- Richard Dimbleby Lecture, October 14, 4 1976, BBC TV. terized as “the best club in London.” Only its members can decide 4 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, what legislation they wish to consider and implement, how they (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1998 [1865]), 234. © 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/DESI_a_00222 DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 3 Summer 2013 75 organize themselves to conduct such business, what hours they work, what pay and expenses they receive, who may lobby them, and so forth. Republican democracies have tried to balance the powers of such self-validating representative assemblies through the office of a president, elected in place of the hereditary constitu- tional monarch of the Westminster prototype. The different uses of ballot boxes in ancient and modern eras then indicate key issues to be addressed by anyone interested in designing a more contemporary political balloting system. Mod- ern information and communication technologies (ICT) naturally suggest far more effective means of balloting, characterized as “e-voting,” as well as greater opportunities for canvassing and expressing public opinion, characterized as “e-democracy.” Since Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/29/3/75/1715207/desi_a_00222.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 the late 1990s, ICT voting platforms have enabled audiences to cast votes for game show contestants using touch-tone telephones, and many large organizations elect their senior officers using Internet voting platforms. In the past decade, many governments have con- ducted trials of Internet voting, as well as various trials of tele- phone voting at a regional level in countries including Canada, The Netherlands, and the United States.5 Despite all these trials, at the time of writing, Estonia appears to be the only nation that has an Internet voting system for national elections. This slow progress appears surprising in light of continuing public demonstrations around the world against election results obtained by paper balloting, and indeed, some polling machines, as in the “hanging chad” furor following the disputed results of the U.S. 2000 presidential election. This lack of design success raises the question of what the obstacles to devising a successful system are. Regardless of the design category in which we might choose to place e-voting systems—whether product, interface, or service design—the design of all physical voting systems clearly involves factors both human and technical. Since the political nature of any democratic voting system invokes peoples’ sense of their “rights,” voting systems naturally raise competing notions of rights, both between different groups of citizens and between citi- zens and politicians. Such competition makes e-voting a highly unusual example of product or service design. To demonstrate how unusual a “service” political e-voting is, this article examines a case study of a proposed telephone voting system design, which seeks to overcome the security problems inherent in the physical form of Internet systems by using encryption methods now famil- iar in both telephone and Internet banking. As the case study shows, the human factors that confronted this particular design proposal presented far more significant obstacles to its successful implementation than any of the technical issues encountered. 5 Tiresias.org, “Countries with E-voting Projects,” www.tiresias.org/research/ guidelines/evoting_projects.htm (accessed March 21, 2012). 76 DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 3 Summer 2013 The Differences Between e-Voting Platforms “E-voting” is a vague term used to describe fundamentally differ- ent ICT platforms. Such platforms include: 1) Internet systems, 2) polling booth machines, and 3) telephone voting systems. Fur- ther confusion arises from the conflation of the terms e-voting and “e-democracy.” The former is a neutral description of the kind of activity enabled by the three ICT systems listed, whereas e-democ- racy is a theorized consequence of people’s use of some form of ICT platform to disseminate their views, even though such a plat- form (e.g., a website or a Twitter thread) might not offer any voting functions at all. Computer-connected polling booth machines have proven to be the most successful ICT voting platforms, and are now used Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/29/3/75/1715207/desi_a_00222.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 in political elections in a number of major democracies, including India, Brazil, France, and the United States. Unlike earlier record- ing machines, of the sort used in the U.S. 2000 presidential elec- tion, the telephonically connected ones transmit voters’ choices to a central computer system, which obviates the labor of collating the results of many stand-alone machines and gives a final result within hours of the closing of the polls. Internet voting systems aim to go one step further by enabling electors to vote remotely from a polling station, using the web on any personal computer or web-enabled mobile phone. The labor-saving potential of this platform, as well as its connectivity to e-democracy websites makes Internet voting the most widely discussed ICT platform. Unfortunately, the security issues involved also make it the most controversial one proposed. Telephone voting, as originally conceived by those such as Buckminster Fuller, involved employing switchboard operators to record the outcome of telephone conversations with callers.6 But since the digitalization of telecommunication technologies in the 1990s, telephone voting has become an ICT system, where a central computer can record the tones generated when callers press the phone’s number pad. The convergence of computer and mobile phone technologies also enables other possibilities, such as the use 6 Richard Buckminster Fuller, No More Second Hand God: And Other Writings of short message service (SMS) capabilities, voice activated relays, (New York: Anchor Books, 1971), 9-10. or a web application. In terms of remote voting then, the telephone 7 Relaxnews, “Global Mobile Phone has the following clear advantages over Internet voting systems: Ownership: The Haves and Have-Nots • Globally, access to and ownership of telephones is far by Region,” The Independent, March 26, higher than that of computers. The personal ownership 2011. www.independent.co.uk/life-style/ of mobile telephones alone is estimated to be 60%,7 while gadgets-and-tech/global-mobile-phone- ownership-the-haves-and-havenots-by- only 20% have access to PCs, including corporately region-2257105.html (accessed March owned ones.8 20, 2012). • Successfully using the basic functions of a telephone 8 Michael Durwin, Global v. U.S. Statistics: requires far less knowledge than using a computer; Mobile, Social Network, PC Ownership, phone “literacy” is far higher than computer literacy. www.mdurwin.com/2011/03/global-v-us- statistics-mobile-social-network-pc-own- ership (accessed March 20, 2012). DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 3 Summer 2013 77 • Telephone functions cannot be over-taken by hackers in the same way as those can be of a computer. • Telephones can only communicate with a computer system by relaying sounds rather than data; thus, phone signals cannot be used to modify the computer software. • The costs of a telephone voting system can easily be recovered by using standard phone call charging, but they cannot be easily recovered from a web-based system without use of an e-commerce application. Cost recovery from the labor-intensive polling machine system is even more difficult and, in practical terms, could only be achieved through public taxation.