George Yang, Author at Goody Feed

Surely by now, we’d be able to vote online, right? Just log in to SingPass and vote, and ta-da: everything’s done without you having to step out of your house. Well, no. And here are the reasons. Security, Security and Security I know what you’re thinking: just make it more secure lah. If only it could be so easy. You see, online shopping, online banking or even your emails are actually very, very secure. Add in 2FA and it’ll be even more secure than your browsing history. After all, these platforms are made by the best brains in the world. But yet, you’re still reading stories about how people got “hacked”. It’s because despite the platform being highly secure, your device also needs to be secure. If you’ve been watching some Japanese movies at night, your device is most probably compromised. And we’re not talking about fly-by-night hackers who just installed a malware in your computer: we’re talking about well-funded state attack that could have been lurking in your device since the day you bought it. Other than that, there’s still social engineering hack. In a nutshell, social engineering is a tactic used by hackers to slowly, but surely, convince you to click on a link or provide details. An example is a sudden email by your boss to click on a link: when you see your boss’ email address, you’d not think twice and click it immediately, right? Well, it could be a spoofed email and once you click on the link, your device might be compromised immediately. The worst part of this is that no one would know how many of those online votes are real or fake. Social engineers might even let you vote online for a party via an official channel, but send in another vote through your device. It’s that scary. In fact, I’ll scare you even more: your device might be used for something known as a DDoS attack for years now, because hackers need many devices to implement such an attack and would usually use real devices like yours. While this simple (and main) reason itself would have convinced you it’s not feasible to do online voting, there are more reasons. Not Everyone Goes Online Everyone you know might know what the Internet’s all about, but what you think might not be true. Over in Singapore, the Internet penetration rate is 93%—which means there are still 7% of the population who don’t have access to the Internet or simply don’t want to use it. Unlike online banking whereby there is still an option for non-internet-savvy people to update their passbook in banks, it’d be a mess if there are so many options for elections. Lack of Authenticity on Voters In a typical poll, a person has to present his or her NRIC card to confirm his identity. However, if you do it online, you can easily get someone to vote for you—or worse, someone to vote for you without you knowing. After all, touch your heart and admit that you’ve given your password to someone else before, or you use the password “passwordz” for your password. Who Makes the Platform? This is when impartiality is being questioned: who should create the platform? Remember, during an election, there is supposedly “no Government”, so if an increment government commissioned the development of the platform, wouldn’t there be a conflict of interest? The only option is to get a company, a foreign one instead, to develop the platform, but let’s face it: every company would lead towards somewhere. Whether it’s profit or core values or whatnot, there’s always going to be issues with impartiality. In a traditional poll, different political parties can have their people standing around to witness the voting and counting, so that is always impartial. But moving on, let’s pose the burning question you have now: Are Countries Doing E-Voting? While it seems like e-voting might never occur, there are actually countries and states doing that. Partially, that is. However, they’re usually machines in polling stations instead, and some were scrapped soon after. This is known as “supervised e-voting” since people would still go to polling stations but press buttons instead of using a pen and ballot paper. For example, Ireland spent almost SGD$63 million to buy voting machines that can be used in polling stations, and after a pilot test, they threw away those machines. The other type is called “remote e-voting”, which is what is discussed in this article. Some states do use remote e-voting for smaller elections, and several others used them for overseas voters. However, a full-fledged e-voting system is not in place anywhere yet; usually, it’s combined with the normal voting system. So, would we finally see remote e-voting in the future? Unless the problem of your device’s security is solved, this might be a…remote dream.

George Yang

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