Too many risks in e-voting, says researcher

 

An electronic voting machine on display at the National Assembly of Pakistan in May. (NAP/Twitter pic)

PETALING JAYA: Electronic voting is not feasible in Malaysia at present, according to a political scientist, who cites security risks as being “too large and too big to tolerate”.

Azmil Tayeb, who spent about two months in February this year researching electronic voting – also referred to as e-voting or I-voting – said the system is prone to be compromised.

While Internet security has evolved and become stronger over time, there are a lot of loopholes and vulnerabilities within the whole virtual structure that can be exploited, he said.

And when it comes to something as important as an election where every vote counts, Azmil said voters would want assurance that the ballot they cast by clicking on their computers or smartphones would in fact be tabulated.

Azmil Tayeb.

“Right now there’s no 100% guarantee that it can happen because there is a lot of potential for interference along the way,” said Azmil, who has researched e-voting in Estonia.

He told FMT: “E-voting is not as simple as it is made out to be.”

E-voting comprised a front end, the voter and their devices; a middle which is the server where the online ballots would be stored and the back end, where the votes would be counted.

Azmil, of Universiti Sains Malaysia, said there were security loopholes “at every point” which could be exploited.

The front end, he said, was most vulnerable, and hackers could easily send bots and malware to infect personal electronic devices.

The central server, where ballots would be sent, were also vulnerable to DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service attacks) in which a targeted server is flooded with hundreds of thousands of simultaneous requests, causing the servers to overload and crash.

Such attacks could result in votes being wrongly tabulated, he said.

Azmil said that e-voting had been carried out in several parts of the world, at times on a limited basis before being discontinued as the risks were “too great”, especially to democracy and a government’s legitimacy.

“And that’s the entire point of an election. To give legitimacy to a government. If you lose that, then that’s it.

“The safest and more secure way to vote was still through a paper ballot.”

Azmil said that while there was no guarantee that e-voting systems were safe from attacks, there were ways to limit such incidents, including the setting up of a self-enclosed voting ecosystem.

“This meant it was not linked to the public infrastructure, protecting it from outside interference. And while it was not 100% secure it was better than ones connected to the public internet infrastructure which made it vulnerable to hackers.”

One way to do this, Azmil said, was for e-voting to be done at the polling station, where people would cast the vote on an electronic board similar to the ones found at fast-food joints.

The votes would not only be tallied faster, but similar kiosks could be set up in public spaces like shopping malls and municipal offices.

But he said that would see voters congregating in these areas, a health risk in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“There’s always going to be a trade-off. Which virus do you want to avoid? Covid or malware? That’s the conundrum.”

Last year, the Perikatan Nasional government said it was engaging various stakeholders to see if e-voting was feasible for the next general election, as it involved issues pertaining to data confidentiality, security, cost and voter education.

The issue rose amid talk of a snap election during the Covid-19 pandemic. - FMT