Would electronic voting make SA’s elections easier?

As South Africa’s long voting queues and cumbersome systems slowed the progress of the country’s seventh general election, experts have been exploring the introduction of electronic voting.

The Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) has looked into it in some detail over the past couple of years, as the IEC has sought to find ways to trim the longer-term costs of running elections on a shrinking budget. As part of a report trying to assess the pros and cons of electronic voting, HSRC researchers looked at the technical feasibility of electronic voting and asked South Africans whether we’d trust it if it were widely deployed.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Elections dashboard

As voting drew to a close on Wednesday, 29 May, many stations processed voters well past midnight. Voters at the University of Pretoria were among the hardiest of the country’s queuers, with the last determined voter casting their ballot at around 5am.

In some areas, the slowness of voter processing has been the result of the sheer physicality of the voting process and the need to securely move literal tons of voter registers and other material to more than 23,000 voting stations.

In addition to needing to secure and deliver printed material, having to parse it with human eyes can make a slow process even slower. At Wits University, when electronic voter management scanners went offline, poll staff faced having to manually verify thousands of voters using printed voter rolls.

The pace of manual, paper-based voting has resulted in calls for turning South Africa’s voting process entirely digital – the dream of an election with a minimal footprint, where votes can be logged and tallied virtually instantly, countrywide.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Queues and more queues as first poll result declared just past midnight

The idea of electronic voting is not new – to South Africa or other nations. The basic idea is that voting would look much the same as at present, except that instead of a paper ballot, you would select a party on a touchscreen or some other voting machine interface.

That vote then doesn’t need to be manually counted in the manner of physical votes, but can simply be added – virtually immediately – to municipal, regional and national totals. A national election could be over in a little more than a day.

To audit the process, observers can verify that the total national vote is accurately composed of the sum of all of the provincial votes, and that the total votes for each province are accurately made up of the sum of the various municipal votes.

On a technical level, electronic voting would rely on a number of different resources to run well. It would require volunteers capable of navigating an entirely new vote-logging process from the level of the remote voting station to the central counting and auditing systems at regional and national levels.

Moreover, for those of us headed to the polls to vote, a switch to electronic voting would require voters to become familiar with a ballot marking process that would be substantially different from the paper process that has defined voting in the popular imagination since 1994. Voter education around how to vote using an electronic voting machine would need to take place in a country where basic digital literacy is still unevenly distributed.

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