Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1093354
12 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 17 MARCH 2019 NEWS DAVID HUDSON MALTESE elections are unique in the way hundreds of party activists and canvassers congregate inside the national counting hall to monitor the live count of votes, collecting tallies of the data as it is read out to calculate samples, and hit the Perspex separator wall hard when a vote is incorrectly counted. The process, which usually takes over three days to fully complete, usually delivers a first-count vote tally within 12 hours, but sampling of votes delivers a clear picture of who the winner is within the first hour of sorting. In November of last year, the vote counting hall in Naxxar was transformed to include a fully-functioning electronic system from Idox, a Scot- tish software company. Their technology will be used for the European Parliament and local council elections in May this year, less than two months from now. E-counting will be used in a bid to speed up the process and to minimise human error. Voting will still be a manual endeavour via a ballot paper. But the Nationalist Party has said that it has no faith in the electronic vote counting set- up after its officials noticed serious shortcomings during test runs of the new system. After a second run of tests, PN MP Beppe Fenech Adami said in parliament that the vote- counting machines still had an error rate of 20%, an alarming figure especially in local coun- cil elections where winners are sometimes decided by a hand- ful of votes. During the first test run, the system had rejected 40% of the votes for being "dubious" – that is, delivering an incor- rect voting preference or ballot sheet – with the scanner un- able to identify certain mark- ings on the ballot papers. The Electoral Commission has declared it is satisfied that the system will guarantee an accurate result, and that this will be achieved in a short amount of time. But the com- mission also announced that further tests would be carried out in the presence of both po- litical parties. Labour's delegate to the Elec- toral Commission, Louis Gatt, told MaltaToday that besides the e-counting system, there would be 26 adjudicators present while votes are be- ing counted – one from each party and two from each dis- trict. "When the Nationalist Party said it did not trust the process, it's only because of a test that Idox carried out with- out informing either party," he said. Since the scanned images usually produce a lot of 'noise', meaning a foggy rendering due to the movement of the ballot paper in the machine, Idox had used a kind of tape at the top and bottom of each ballot pa- per, Gatt explained. This is to reduce the move- ment of the ballot paper as it went through the electronic device. "To the Nationalist Party, this meant that certain details could be masked, that the bal- lot papers could be tampered with," he said, adding that this issue was also addressed when it was decided that each bal- lot paper, during the scanning process, would be issued with a unique number. "This gives traceability to the whole process. It would be easy to compare the scanned images with the physical ballot papers, not to mention the fact that the images will also be dis- played on many screens in the counting hall for the counting hall agents to scrutinise," Gatt said. While the system will deliver faster counting results, it does nothing to change the way we vote on the day – such as de- livering precise data on how people are voting. But Partit Demokratiku expressed its concerns on possible clien- telism and abuse since politi- cal parties are allowed to re- tain scanned ballot sheets for up to three months after an election. The PD claimed that voters who are willing to offer up their vote for a favour may be identified from the pattern of their voting preferences on the ballot sheet, making them- selves recognisable without having to illegally take a photo of the ballot sheet in the voting booth. But what was the experience of other countries with regard to the electronic voting sys- tem? Is there something we can learn? Brazil: a largely fool proof system Brazil was the first country to adopt an electronic voting sys- tem back in 1996 and to make voting fully electronic in 2000. In 2010 – the presidential elec- tion, which involved more than 135 million voters – the result was announced 75 minutes af- ter the end of voting. This was done through half a million machines the size of desktop printers. According to the pollster Gallup, however, only 14% of Brazilians see elections as hon- est. Gerardo de Icaza, Director of the Department of Elec- toral Cooperation said that electronic voting has "not pro- duced a single solid case" of tampering. However, the Superior Elec- toral Court in Brazil invited hackers to test the system and said that while it's quite impos- sible for a politician to commit large-scale fraud since the ma- chines are not connected to the internet, someone with ac- cess to the software can easily manipulate results without be- ing detected since Brazil lacks a "voter-verified paper audit trail." Felipe Seligman, a reporter on the judiciary, said that elec- tronic voting made Brazil's elections more reliable, not less. Estonia: voting from home Estonia was described as a pioneer of electronic voting by Forbes and others. It has the cheapest form of voting in the world with just €2.32 per electronic vote. Estonians use their smart identity card to log into their own computers and vote on- line from home or from abroad while travelling. The system allows them to keep changing their vote up until election day. This elimi- nates some concerns over vote buying and coercion. For those who don't wish to use this digital form of voting, traditional paper voting is still fully available. While a number of internet experts said that the system could be easily compromised by hackers back in May 2014, Estonia has implemented cryp- tographic measures since then and the Estonian Information System Authority described the experts' analysis as a politi- cal attack rather than a techni- cal one. India: current fears of mass hack These past few weeks, foreign papers were reporting on fears of a mass cyber attack on the electronic voting system in In- dia. Being the size of a conti- nent and with a population of around 1.3 billion, one of 1.6 million voting machines around the country is bound to malfunction, especially since these are battery-operated to cater for areas missing elec- tricity. Back in 2014 an Indian cy- ber expert seeking political asylum in the US claimed that the 2014 general election was rigged through the electronic voting system. Nitish Kumar, Chief Minis- ter of Bihar, a state in eastern India, said that the technology strengthened people's right to vote and with the recently in- troduced verifiable paper audit trails, everyone's minds should be put at rest. When a vote is cast, a pa- per slip is printed containing the serial number, name and symbol of the candidate and remains exposed through a transparent window for seven seconds. After this, this slip automatically gets cut and falls into a sealed drop box. Authorities have decided to tally these slips and compare them with the electronic result but authorities said that this could be expensive and time- consuming. Is Malta justified in joining the voting future? When other countries have had their electronic voting systems fail, facing threats of a mass hack or even backtracking and going back to traditional paper voting, should Malta be thinking twice about its new counting system?