The Challenge Electronic Voting Poses

Now that elections are around the elections are around the corner, its time to rejuvenate the electronic voting debate. In fact, Kenyans in diaspora now want the government to confirm the use of electrical voting in the next general election. To avoid the recurrence of the chaos in 2007, it would be prudent to adopt technology in the next electoral process. According to the Election officials it could take six years before Kenya adopts an electronic voting system, which is attributed to the high cost of deploying the system. In an effort to initiate a gradual migration to electronic voting, IIEC has already commenced electronic voter registration in 18 constituencies. A total of about 1.5 million voters were registered and their demographic details captured – including biometric features; a facial image and fingerprint.

By definition, electronic voting encompasses different types of voting that embrace both electronic means of casting a vote and electronic means of vote counting. Electronic voting technology punched cards, optical scan voting systems and specialized voting kiosks. Care should be taken since electronic voting can be vulnerable and could facilitate electoral fraud. The technology has been around for a while, since punched card systems debuted in the 1960s. Currently, Internet voting systems have gained popularity and have been used for government elections and referendums in the United Kingdom, Estonia and Switzerland as well as municipal elections in Canada and party primary elections in the United States and France.

Electronic voting technology has its benefits. For instance, it can speed the counting of ballots and can provide improved accessibility for disabled voters. It can also provide a convenient mode of voting for Kenyan in the Diasporas. However, there are some shortcomings of this technology, casing point - the United States Presidential Election of 2000 that spurred the debate about electronic voting. In the aftermath of the election, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed to help states upgrade their election technology in the hopes of preventing similar problems in future elections. Unfortunately, the electronic voting systems that many states purchased to comply with HAVA actually caused problems in the presidential election of 2004.

Deployment of electronic voting systems is also complex and expensive, thus electronic ballots may not necessarily be less costly than printed ballots. The cost never goes down. Actually, the cost only goes up as the machines age and need more parts and upgrading. If Kenya were to use touch-screen voting machines, similar to a touch ATM, it would cost of between Kshs. 1.35 Million and Kshs. 2.7 Million per precinct - precinct consists of between 5 and 10 machines respectively. Other costs would include operation and maintenance of the machines, power, storage of the machines as well as programming, testing, auditing and transporting them to precincts on election days.

There are plenty of implementation and policy problems with moving to electronic voting systems, but the technology the benefits far out way these problems. Having suffered post-electoral chaos, Kenya would consider such an option that would provide an election process much more transparent for officials and voters. The benefits for citizens are immediate and obvious, in particular the improved services for voters and less time required to vote, hence shorter queues. Another advantage is that the new systems' step-by-step process will prevent situations in which a citizen mistakenly votes more than once. There is faster tabulation of results, improved accessibility, greater accuracy, and lower risk of human and mechanical errors. Recall the infamous form 16A during the 2007 General election.

Many countries have attempted to take advantage of electronic voting. Electronic voting in Estonia began in October 2005 local elections when Estonia became the first country to have legally binding general elections using the Internet as a means of casting the vote and was declared a success by the Estonian election officials. In 2005 Estonia became the first country to offer Internet voting nationally in local elections. 9,317 people voted online. In 2007, the Australian Defence Force and Defence civilian personnel deployed on operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Timor Leste and the Solomon Islands had the opportunity to vote via the Defence Restricted Network with an Australian Electoral Commission and Defence Department joint pilot project. Electronically submitted votes were printed following polling day, and dispatched to the relevant Divisions for counting. Kenya might strive to make a mark in being the pioneer of electronic voting in Africa.