Prime Minister Imran Khan received
a detailed demonstration of a locally made EVM last week. While the Minister
for Science and Technology, Shelbi Farad, claimed the machines “couldn’t be
hacked”, the PM tweeted out
his hope that “finally we will have elections in Pakistan where all contestants
will accept the results.”
THE BENEFITS OF ELECTION
TECHNOLOGY
Election technology is an enigma. It does bring proven and
documented benefits. Introduction of EVMs and results transmission systems
(RTSs) dramatically speed up result reporting. This is a blessing in developing
countries such as the Philippines, various African nations and even Pakistan,
where extended delays in counting and reporting tend to provide a window for
vote tampering.
EVMs have also considerably reduced polling-station
fraud in India. Unlike paper-based elections, EVMs prevent incorrect marking
and spoilage of ballots, ensuring that every vote actually counts.
THE DARK SIDE OF ELECTION
TECHNOLOGY
Almost every voting system which has been seriously
investigated — EVM or internet voting platform — has been hacked. In most
cases, the hacking has been trivially easy. There are even YouTube demos on the
topic.
The world’s premier security conference, Deacon, now conducts
an annual election technology hackathon, with the aim of educating
policymakers, election administrators and civil society. In the 2019 iteration,
the organizers gathered 100 voting machines, each of which was certified for
use in one or more US states. Over the course of the weekend, every single one
was hacked. The organizers, renowned experts in election security,
commented in their report: “As disturbing as this outcome is, we note that
it is at this point an unsurprising result.”
Another critically important security difference: in stark
contrast to banks, election systems attract a whole different class of attacker
— elite intelligence agencies. There is ample evidence of state-backed Russian and Chinese campaigns
infiltrating US voting systems. We are now formally in the domain of
cyberwarfare, a whole new league.
A key weapon in the cyberwarfare arsenal is the secret
practice of discovering and hoarding knowledge of system vulnerabilities and
then exploiting them at the most critical time with devastating effect. This is
called a ‘zero-day attack’ — because the attacked party literally gets zero
days to fix the problem.
The Stunt worm, a malicious computer malware that wreaked
havoc on Iran’s nuclear program in 2010 used four hitherto unknown
vulnerabilities in Windows, an unprecedented number. In 2015, researchers demonstrated zero-day
attacks on the largest internet voting deployment in the world, the New South
Wales vote system.
A rich body of research literature has emerged to analyses
such cases. The real reason, some suspect, is not technological, it is perhaps
psychological. In a recent paper studying the “unintended consequences of
election technology” in African countries, elections expert Nick Cheese man
suggests that “…the growing use of these technologies has been driven by the
fetishisation of technology, rather than by rigorous assessment of their
effectiveness; that they may create significant opportunities for corruption
that vitiate their potential impact; and that they carry significant
opportunity costs. Indeed, precisely because new technology tends to deflect
attention away from more ‘traditional’ strategies, the failure of digital
checks and balances often renders an electoral process even more vulnerable to
rigging than it was before.”
This fetishisation commonly manifests in the belief that
technology will result in perfectly secure and trusted elections, as legitimate
as those in any Western country.
This very rarely happens. Technology does not eliminate the
burden of trust, it usually shifts it from one party to another — electronic
voting systems may protect against some attacks, but might not against others.
In several cases, this use of technology introduces its own
set of risks, a common concept in risk management. Attacks evolve with time.
Security features that look good on paper may fail in reality and those that
work in one country may not deliver in another. Technology has to be very
carefully adapted to the social and cultural realities of each environment.
Cheese man quotes various other concerns very relevant to us:
election technology is usually implemented in ways that priorities efficiency
over transparency. The glitter of new technology tends to distract our
attention away from the overall ecosystem that needs to be built to manage and
support the technology.
Indeed, some elements of this ecosystem may require more
attention and expense than the technology itself. Deploying technology gives
rise to immense new organizational and logistical challenges that most
countries may be unprepared for.
Many electoral commissions rely heavily on international
funding and foreign expertise, and the long-term sustainability of such
technology interventions is questionable. Most importantly, technology will
likely not address social and human factors — problems such as voter
intimidation, bribery, coercion, media bias and abuse of state power — which
are also critical to restoring citizen confidence in elections.
But Cheese man is keen to assert that he is not against
election technology in principle: “These observations are not intended as a
manifesto against the digitization of elections … but the analysis draws
attention to the importance of more careful assessments of these problems, as
well the benefits, of such technologies — and to the need for more careful
planning in their deployment.”
This is how we, in Pakistan, need to approach election
technology too.
We need to build capacity on the election technology front.
This is hard work but relatively straightforward. We also need to work on the
ecosystem. This is much harder work that requires research, dialogue, vision
and statesmanship.
Election technology has had a very troubled history, but
there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Researchers have finally resolved
the Gordian knot, the seemingly-impossible conflict between voter privacy and
transparency. There have been revolutionary game-changing developments in the
past decade: it is now possible to maintain voter privacy while also ensuring
that votes are not tampered with.
Researchers have devised ways to cryptographically track
individual votes without revealing their content whilst also ensuring that they
have been correctly counted. An easy way to picture this is how one can track a
courier delivery using a tracking number — with the surprising futuristic
feature that the number also serves as a guarantee that no one has tampered
with your package.
This new paradigm of ‘evidence-based elections’ and
‘verifiability’ gives voters ironclad guarantees that the votes they cast have
not been manipulated. Voters no longer have to repose blind faith in technology
and poll workers, they can now audit these systems at home using their
computers or phones. This level of transparency is unprecedented and is a giant
step towards restoring citizen confidence in elections.
When we were authoring our IVTF report in 2018, our foremost
recommendation to the ECP was that it urgently institute a research wing. It’s
first mission: to investigate and adapt verifiable voting systems for Pakistan.
Estonia was first to implement this successfully. Other countries are taking
note.
The Indian state of Telangana is actively studying the
Estonian system for its own pilot. Microsoft has partnered with some of the
world’s largest election technology vendors to make EVMs verifiable. It is
cause for celebration that our own stakeholders are converging to
this technology. After a few bumpy steps, this is an excellent start to our own
election technology journey.
But there is a lot more work to be done.
A WORTHWHILE JOURNEY
For one, the ECP will require a concerted modernization
drive. It is simply not possible to deploy electronic voting on a large scale
otherwise. The ECP also needs to actively reorient towards technology.
Thus far, the ECP has a stellar track record of assisting
voters with technology, a prime example being the award-winning 8300 SMS
service, which voters use to access their voting information on their cell
phones. But with election technology, for some puzzling reason, the ECP has
chosen to outsource the difficult problems. This has proved counterproductive.
By not cultivating in-house technology expertise, the ECP is
forced to look to vendors, who typically lack expertise in new technologies and
are also not familiar with the intricacies and ground realities of Pakistan’s
elections landscape. This automatically restricts options. Tiny tweaks in
existing systems are possible, but the window for genuine innovation is closed.
In a sense, the ECP’s immense technology dependency is a subtle yet very real
limitation on the ECP’s vaunted autonomy.
Second, we need to work hard on the ecosystem. The ECP and
the government need to encourage extensive consultation and wide-ranging
stakeholder participation in every step of the process. The opposition needs to
take up the government’s invitation to discuss electoral reforms. Election
technology is too important to be left solely in the hands of technologists,
politicians and government officials.
President Arif Alvi has taken the lead in bringing the debate
to the public. It is equally vital that civil society assert itself. Citizen
activists, academics and civil society actually lead election integrity efforts
in countries like the US and India. Fafen’s (Free and Fair Election Network)
call “for a more extended public and political discourse” is certainly very
welcome. Pildat (Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and
Transparency) also recently organized a very successful short course to
kick-start a sustained discussion.
But there is a mountain of research still to be done. We need
to build every different kind of EVM and internet voting system under the sun.
We need to trial promising systems at every possible opportunity, in university
elections, trader organization polls, and bar councils. We need to conduct high
quality pilots with scientific rigor. We need to immerse ourselves in the
e-voting literature and document ecosystem components, best practices,
standards and common pitfalls.
We need to build bridges with the international research
community, the way Estonia, India and Australia have done. We need bug bounties
and hackathons that meet international standards. We need usability studies, we
need cost-benefits analyses, we need threat models and risk assessments.
We need to devise mechanisms to facilitate transparency and
third-party audits suited to Pakistan. We need research on logistics, workflow
and maintenance. If we’re going to set up one of the largest EVM deployments in
the world — over 300,000 machines — we need environmental impact studies.
This list is a long one.
This sort of work — genuine research and development to adapt
technology to our own unique and complex ground realities — has rarely ever
been done before. It is unclear if we even have the expertise and capacity to
undertake such studies. We need to build this culture.
In the West, it is the modus operandi: technology policy is
directly informed by high quality research. Usually this is accomplished via
research collaborations, round-table conferences, seminars, working groups, and
public calls for comments. Last year, when South Africa mulled the introduction
of electronic voting, there were over 12,000 submissions from the
general public and civil society.
If this seems like too much work, it is.
If there is one key lesson in the saga of election
technology, it is that we cannot afford shortcuts. We need to follow every process
in the book, we need to dot ever I and cross every t. The election technology
ecosystem is typically the most neglected component in deployments.
An easier way to think of this: we don’t just need
Estonia-style software to succeed — we need to develop the kind of ethos in
which people can innovate such systems and deploy and use them successfully. We
need to inculcate that sense of professionalism, that commitment to
transparency and democracy, those high standards of research and — most
importantly — that sense of vision and depth.
There is an elegant irony in the fact that the real secret to
succeeding with election technology is not just about having the fanciest
machine or the most cutting-edge system. Rather, it is linked to the quality of
our effort, how we engage and collaborate with each other and our genuine
commitment to transparency. To quote Cheese man again regarding election
technology in Africa: “Unsurprisingly, we find that the greatest gains from digitization
come from countries where the quality of democracy is higher and the electoral
commission more independent.”
