Electronic voting reliability can be accomplished through transparency, anonymity, and redundancy. By ensuring all three of these principles are followed, electronic voting can be more reliable and secure than in-person voting.
ElectionBuddy has a host of election resources for organizations of all kinds to help guide them through proper election procedures. We also offer a host of security measures to ensure that voting is conducted in a manner that meets international standards.
Votes are meaningless without accountability, but how is accountability handled on a digital platform? Here are a few steps that can be taken:
Each step in the voting process should be recorded. Has the ballot been opened? What time was the vote cast? Was the ballot changed or modified at any point? Online systems have several safeguards to ensure audits can take place without compromising voter identity.
Organizations with a lot at stake have every reason to ask for third-party verification of their votes. The features listed above help auditors in their search for irregularities, allowing them to mass-verify ballots as trustworthy and avoid wasting funds through unnecessary scrutiny.
With the certification of a third party, results are much more likely to be accepted by the community as a whole. The key is for voters to understand those in power had nothing to do with verifying results, as it was undertaken by an independent party.
Certifying elections requires more than counting votes. It also necessitates making sure only those who were eligible to vote did so. Scientific and medical organizations actively exclude the public at large. They require that their members be educated and meet standards before being allowed to vote. This is critical to these organizations’ ability to make decisions and elect leaders based on established community guidelines without the input of the general public.
Secure sign-in options for approved members is one way to accomplish this, as long as anonymity is maintained key.
Reliability doesn’t mean simply making sure votes are secure. It's also about voters having faith that their opinions are anonymous. Voters who are not allowed to vote anonymously may feel pressured by peers. Results obtained non-anonymously cannot be relied upon, as voters may fear the repercussions of their vote.
Ironically, security is the primary driver of enhanced anonymity. It doesn’t only guarantee that voting outcomes can’t be altered, it guarantees voters remain anonymous.
Encryption is the key that keeps everyone safe. Verifiable ballot receipts help voters feel confident their vote was counted. Making anonymity the cornerstone of security enhances voter faith in the results.
Redundancy to most people means keeping information backed up in a secondary location. In online voting systems, this is still the case. However, the redundancy should also be built into the system itself.
The audit trails mentioned earlier are a key example of how redundancy can be used to verify votes. Even if online ballot counting fails, there are digital breadcrumbs that can be used to piece the puzzle together. Similarly, voter eligibility is in itself a form of redundancy, as only those eligible to vote could have done so.
Real-time monitoring is also key to maintaining a stable voting system. It allows for potential problems to be identified and mitigated before they become destabilizing issues.
ElectionBuddy has a comprehensive elections platform that makes voting for anything and anyone as convenient as possible. Everyone from associations to organizations to political parties can use it to conduct secure, fast, and reliable elections.
There are multiple available voting methods, personalized instructions, and tools for third-party auditors, so both the organizations themselves and their voters can have confidence in the security and reliability of ElectionBuddy’s systems. Our platform offers high-level security paired with unparalleled levels of accessibility for all voters.
With ElectionBuddy, you can nominate candidates, put platform ideas to a vote, and hold unbiased elections. Results are nearly instantaneous and can be monitored throughout the process to ensure complete election integrity.
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