If you ask a random person in the world of computing, there are good chances they will not have a good opinion on electronic voting. Indeed, this population, more informed than average, knows that there is no information system without flaws, whether they come from bugs, design errors, or intensional insertion of “backdoors”. Moreover, the majority of the electronic voting systems in use today require to give the keys of the voting boxes to a “trusted third party”, without any possible check on the correct conduct of the ballot, from which a legitimate distrust arises, all the more important when the stakes of an election are great.

Illustration by Klifton Kleinmann.

But it would be absolutely naive to be content with rejecting electronic voting on the whole because it is already in use everywhere: from professional elections, to associations… and even in certain political elections. Moreover, many politicians are now advocating for a general implementation of electronic voting, in particular with the aim of improving the rate of participation. We therefore shouldn’t refuse to look at and analyze the risks and benefits induced by this type of ballot. Or rather, we should say, these types of ballots. Electronic voting can be of two very different kinds: voting machines and Internet voting. We will deal with both but take care to distinguish between their issues.

Read the rest of this article on Kinea, the multilingual magazine where it was published.