Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 23 November 2007 11:08
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Mobile phones provide an almost perfect medium for which to facilitate e-voting. According to IDC, the mobile phone subscriber base in 2006 reached 20.42 million, or 98.4 percent penetration of the Australian population, making SMS text messaging an ideal voting medium to engage with the electorate.
But as you would expect, there is always the question of security – and fraud.
Acision’s Bill Dekker says that a pre-registration system would easily match the current level of fraud prevention built into postal voting, with added security options such as passwords and message tracking tightening security processes even further.
Dekker says that SMS is 100 percent reliable, and with a small investment in infrastructure, SMS voting can be set up to ensure secure delivery of votes, and can cut out the risk of fraud much more effectively that current postal voting methods do, while also generating an electronic audit trail.
But what else can be done on the backend to ensure security there?
Dekker explained that “Write once, read many (WORM) disk technologies are available that you can write to once only, and not again, once a vote has been registered. This creates an electronic paper trail that you can do an electronic audit on, letting you go back to the original records. Banks use it for loan applications and processing the paperwork to go with loans, it gets store to write once read many disks – so people can’t doctor the records”.
Dekker says that WORM technologies have been in use for years, both on CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, other forms of optical disc, but it’s a technology that’s been available for hard drives for a few years now, with major enterprise-level storage company EMC an example of just one company offering WORM hard disk technologies to companies that want to secure their records yet store them on hard drives for speed and other reasons.
Dekker also says that “Currently people count all the paperwork up and put it into an electronic system – and who’s to say that can’t be changed when it’s being entered in electronically? To do a recount is costly and time consuming – with electronic systems you just run another report. With SMS you could run an election and have a result within an hour”.
Given the tens of billions of SMS messages that will be transferred between Christmas and New Year’s Eve this year alone, Dekker says that the number of SMS e-votes in any election would just be a ‘blip on the radar’ in comparison for today’s SMS platforms.
Please read onto page 3 to see where SMS e-voting has been in use around the world...
