Have you voted yet? I am currently 21 years old, and I shamefully confess that I have not yet voted. I have a lot of good reasons why I haven’t, but the one I would like to focus on is lack of easy access to voting. Ever since I turned 13 I have been living out of my country of nationality, which makes it harder to vote. I could vote from any country Ecuador, my country, has an embassy/consulate in. If I live in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, the process would involve going to the consulate in Amsterdam or The Hague, registering, and when time has come sending my ballot. The whole process would probably take a total of 6 hours. Whereas making an online transfer can be done in less than a minute. My point being that millennials have not been properly equipped with the ability to go through one of these processes without finding it completely inefficient and “a waste of our time”. Could this be the reason why the turnout for Brexit for people between 18 and 24 was so low? I’m not going to go into how we must change society so that this stops happening, but into changing the process to fit the new society.
Online voting has been the standard in Estonia since 2005, when will the rest of the world level up? One of the main concerns regarding online voting is security. How can you make sure that no one will hack the system and change the results? This is a very valid concern, since the amount of people with accessibility (even if limited) to the system will be higher than it currently is. But what if we implement a system that works in a very similar way to Bitcoin. A peer-reviewed system that can work with verifications. Currently, you have to trust that the counting systems and people involved with these, but how about not having to trust anyone and being able to check it all.
A downside of this could be that people do not want to share with others who they voted for, even less so with authority figures. But imagine the following scenario: you have to provide your citizen information to be able to vote, and after you cast your vote, you are given a username which you can use to track your vote without allowing your ID to be linked to the vote. The rest of demographical information can remain in the system and allow for better analysis of the results.
This is a highly simplified version of how an online voting system could work. There are countless things that must be taken into account before making a change in the process, but providing an online voting system would definitely increase the participation of a specific segment of the population in political activities. Don’t you think?
Thanks for your blogpost, very interesting. I guess “offline voting” is a pretty outdated system indeed, and online voting would indeed increase participation, particularly amongst the younger people. However, I do maintain some concerns with online voting due to the vulnerable nature of online services no matter what kind of measures you’ll take (even the FBI gets hacked once in a while). For this reason, I highly doubt online voting to ever become the standard, especially when there are geopolitical incentives to manipulate the voting.
Dear Domenica, great post! I agree with you that often voting is outdated, and that moving online will for sure happen in the future. But I do not think this has to be with Bitcoin. For example, in the Netherlands, every citizen can apply for a DigID (digital ID). With this DigID, you can register for a bachelor, see your debts at studielink, login to your health care providers website, sign up to take a driving test, change your address, etc. The DigID is sent to you by post, and if you forget your username, you have to apply for a new one. Only you can access your DigID, unless you give someone your password, or you authorize someone. Sometimes, to be able to login, you have to get a specialcode which you receive on your mobile phone. Hence, as for online voting, I think the Netherlands could allow its citizens to vote with a DigID. Assuming the DigID is safe already (since you can really access a lot with it), voting should be safe too. Of course there is vulnerability of online services, but who says offline services are that much more trustworthy?
Hey Dominica,
I agree, an online voting system would definitely reduce a lot of the inconveniences involved in physically going to a voting kiosk, and it might just become the norm in the future. I read in an article, even Kenya, like Estonia, has an online voting system in place. Though i understand Bas’s point – security breaches could prove costly to a nation’s political scenario – internet security is a major concern for all things online. And considering the amount of time we spend online, it would be wasteful for election systems to not take advantage of it. After all, we do make huge financial transactions online, i am sure we can eventually extend the same trust to online voting.