When Is It Ok To Undermine A Parliamentary Election?

 

After 25 years working in electoral administration with a large part of that focusing on and delivering electronic voting, I am in two minds about the latest press release from Vanessa Teague pointing out a “system hack that would be difficult to perform” with regard to the NSW Electoral Commission’s iVote internet and phone electronic voting system.

The first principle of electoral administration is that processes should be open and transparent.  Our paper systems in Australia are very open and transparent.  They are conducted in a public place, the counting in the polling place is observed by scrutineers and subsequent rechecks are all open to observation.   Even postal voting has strict guidelines so that during scrutiny the identity of the voter is not revealed. 

Electronic voting has many people who are for and against it.  However the benefits to different sections of the community in a compulsory voting environment are a driving force to its implementation.

In particular, electronic voting benefits voters with a disability who would not otherwise be able to cast their vote secretly or independently.  Electoral administrators are quite rightly being forced to provide for this cohort from the pressure of representative peak bodies and sometimes from litigation.

Many of the electoral commissions in Australia have trialled or fully implemented a form of electronic voting, but mostly these have been in kiosk format. The Australian Electoral Commission did trial a remote voting system for selected areas of our overseas defence force in 2007 (AEC), but even this was not a full internet version as it was conducted on the defence restricted network, giving an extra layer of protection to the outside world of hackers.

So in Australia the NSW Electoral Commission was the first to implement internet and telephone voting in the public domain in 2011 in a general parliamentary election. It was also used successfully in all subsequent by-elections.    At this point I should declare that I was one of the project team in the 2011 implementation and also in the 2007 AEC federal implementation.

As an electoral administrator we are very accountable.  We are required to implement the electoral legislation, ensure the franchise of every voter and provide integrity to all processes.  Following each election there is always a review of our practices by a parliamentary “electoral matters committee”.   These committees are where all matters are reviewed.   Voters, peer groups, pressure groups, political parties, and academics can all make submissions as to how to improve the electoral process.   It is why the Australian systems are often seen as the best in the world.   Vanessa Teague has made many representations to these parliamentary committees regarding her wariness of internet and sometimes kiosk electronic voting, so she is aware of how elections in Australia are formally reviewed.

When reading arguments against electronic voting, it is usually along the lines that instead of one paper vote being tampered, or one ballot box being stuffed, that instead a whole database of votes can be changed.  But it appears that this is not the hack that Ms Teague found in the NSW system.   Her quote is…..

"The analogy would be pulling someone's postal vote envelope out of the post, pulling out their vote and finding out how they intended to vote and then putting a different ballot in instead," Ms Teague said.

So this finding was not a flaw that could change a whole database of votes. 

The Chief Information Officer of NSWEC Mr Ian Brightwell said……

“It’s easy enough to [test the attack] if you sit in a local area network and direct yourself to an internal proxy, but in practical terms to intercept the traffic en masse you’d have to somehow sit in between that particular server and the client’s voting,” he said.

So in this case you would have to actually sit in between the server and the client “when they are voting” to be able to hack their vote.

Ms Teague’s press release also says that they alerted the NSWEC when they found the flaw and waited until it was fixed before publicly talking about it.

So this is where I am in two minds.  As an electoral administrator I need to know if there is an issue in the conduct of my election in order to keep the integrity of the election.  

I am sure that the NSWEC were grateful of the information from Ms Teague.

But to then go public and undermine the confidence of the whole electronic voting system, and potentially the outcome of the election seems to me to be an unnecessary act when Ms Teague could have presented this information in the fullness of time to the NSW electoral matters parliamentary committee as she has often done previously.

Electronic voting is a method of voting that is necessary at this point in time for our special needs groups, but in time it will be more necessary in a paper frugal society, and indeed it will be demanded by our mobile device equipped population. 

The tensions brought about by the people who are for and against electronic voting is good and healthy and will allow for greater security and robustness of future electronic voting systems. However we must reflect on the timing of the release of our arguments inside an active election period.