One of the most interesting new developments in the field of democracy studies is the increasing influence of technology. This is often discussed in the context of social media and its impact on political movements and revolution, as discussed in this post I wrote on Digital Democracy. Another influence of technology – a particularly dangerous one – is the potential for hacking.
While Canada still resorts to the good, old-fashioned ballot voting system, many states in the US use an electronic voting system. Apparently, a few years ago, Washington introduced a new electronic voting system, and sought to demonstrate its effectiveness by holding a mock school board election. They even challenged people to break through it’s state-of-the-art security features without repercussions.
A professor from the University of Michigan and two of his students accepted this challenge and managed to gain control of most of the system within 48 years old, changing the results so that “Bender” (from the TV show Futurama) won with 100% of the vote. It apparently took administrators more than two days to even realize there was an intrusion.
While I’m not sure why this story is being released now, it remains pertinent to the issue. There are undeniable benefits to an electronic voting system. It would allow results to be determined basically immediately. It may increase voter turnout by facilitating the voting process. It would virtually eliminate spoiled ballots, and would (theoretically) eliminate human error from the ballot-counting process.
That being said, paper ballots can’t be hacked. And at the end of the day, as sophisticated as technology may be, it will always be created by a programmer who shares the same wealth of information (or less) as another programmer, or hacker, elsewhere in the world.
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