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Design Alternatives to the Ballot Box Voting System

This paper discusses the issues of e-voting and e-democracy by reference to the case study of a telephone voting system designed and patented in 2004 by the author as the project leader of a team of four associates. The system was featured on BBC news and the author was invited to be a panellist on a BBC Radio 4's "Any Questions" programme on e-voting in 2001. The partial PIN encryption method described is familiar in telephone banking systems.

Democracy depends upon the design of physical systems for citizens’ participation in decision-making. ICTs offer advantages in enabling such participation, yet e-voting has been introduced in only a few smaller nations. This article identifies the technical and human obstacles that may explain the present lack of success in introducing e-voting systems, distinguishing between the features of various e-voting platforms and examining design criteria through a case study of a proposed telephone voting system.

The case study suggests that the potential of e-voting to impinge upon the balance of power in representative democracies is a more significant obstacle than frequently cited issues of data verifiability and security, shown by the use of the same partial PIN systems of caller identification developed for the telephone voting design case study by banks to verify online cash transactions.

The obstacles to developing the case study in the U.K. were the various policies emerging from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 2000-2007. Initial calls for expressions of interest in collaborative research mutated into a tendering process soliciting proprietary systems from established government suppliers. The fact that none of these systems has yet been adopted, suggests that governments fear e-voting might increase the demand for direct democracy, which many e-democracy organisations have been lobbying for as a means of improving current systems of representative democracy.