Can We Improve Philippine Overseas Absentee Voting with the Internet?

Can Estonia’s model of online absentee voting help the Philippines?

Contemporary democratic societies usually make it a point of enfranchising as many of their citizens as possible in order to uphold state ideals of democracy and representation. However, as we see in the Philippine experience, overseas absentee voting is marred by many difficulties, from low turnout to high cost of electoral proceedings. This essay will look at a possible solution to overseas absentee voting, and even absentee voting in general, by looking at the Estonian internet voting scheme.

Absentee voting is the procedure wherein voters who are unable to attend to their official polling stations, whether by distance or disability, are enfranchised to cast their ballot through an alternative electoral system designed to compensate their inability to cast their ballot normally. Overseas absentee voting in the Philippines is an alternative electoral system where Philippine citizens residing abroad such as overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) and seafarers are afforded political enfranchisement to Philippine national elections through satellite polling stations in consulates and voting by post. Both systems have issues such as a possible distance factor to the consulate where overseas absentee voters may have to travel far to cast their ballot or an inefficient or insecure postal system.

Estonian Internet Voting

Estonia has an innovative system of elections that allows their citizens to vote for their local and national representatives using the internet by passing a set of electoral reform laws in 2002 and 2005. However it is important to note that internet voting in Estonia is a supplementary alternative electoral system alongside the classical polling station using physical paper ballots. Approximately 30% of Estonia’s electorate avails of internet voting as of their 2014 and 2015 elections.

It is important to note that the Estonian method of absentee voting is easily available to their government as Estonia has one of the highest rates of internet penetration in the world with 83% penetration in homes, 100% penetration in public schools, and above 90% of the population using internet banking and internet tax filing. Estonia’s high internet penetration is a result of their government’s proactive policies on technology that turned this post-communist economy into a technologically integrated society.

One integral element in Estonia’s internet voting scheme is the use of the Estonian Identification Card which is an important legal document in Estonia that is a proof of citizenship, a voter’s identification document, and most importantly, a smart-card containing the holder’s electronic identity. Estonian Identification Cards have embedded microchips (using technology similar to SIM cards) that has the record of a citizen’s electronic identity and their legally binding digital signature certificate. This ID is used for verification of a citizen’s electronic identity which is used for online banking, online tax filing, and other online government services such as the internet voting process.

The process for internet voting in Estonia is that users log in to the election website and then have their IDs read by an electronic ID card reader attached to their computer (presumably common in the Estonian context of high technological penetration) and then the user inputs their PIN and then they are redirected to an online ballot where they pick their choices and cast their internet ballot by imputing their PIN again and digitally signing their ballot using their ID card. The ballot is then encrypted and stripped of identification data when counted to uphold the secrecy of the ballot. This system was built to explicitly mimic Estonia’s physical voting procedure of protecting the secrecy of the ballot where physical ballots are placed in a small unmarked envelope and then placed in a larger signed and marked envelope which are then separated before counting and counted separately to tally who voted and number of votes in such a way as to separate the vote from the voter.

Challenges

Challenges to the internet voting scheme are still numerous. One concern is that because assigning watchdogs for internet voting is unfeasible, coercion, bribery, manipulation and other forms of electoral violence may occur. Estonian internet voting laws addresses this by allowing internet voters to change their vote as many times as they want until a specified deadline or by casting a ballot at an official polling station that invalidates their internet ballot.

An independent team of security researchers based in the University of Michigan has published in a peer-reviewed paper that Estonia’s internet voting scheme has “architectural limitations and procedural gaps that potentially jeopardize the integrity of elections.” Security issues mentioned range from unprotected WiFi networks, vulnerabilities to malware, hacking threats, transparency issues. To further prove their point, the team successfully hacked and undermined a simulated internet election by creating fake votes and altering vote counts. The research team points the security vulnerabilities towards weak operational management built on outdated security assumptions and fundamental architectural problems and thus recommends scrapping internet voting altogether to protect against cyber-criminal electoral manipulation.

In response, the Estonian National Electoral Committee has criticized the study for lacking in technical details and redundant as the electoral committee has already considered such vulnerabilities beforehand and has already invested much effort in updating and upgrading their internet voting procedures. However, the research team’s points of contention must still be taken into consideration when implementing internet voting.

Philippine Internet Voting?

Can the Philippines employ such a similar system for overseas absentee voting? We must first look at the Philippine context to see if current Philippine infrastructures can support such a system.

It must be noted that such a system of internet voting for overseas absentee voters is dependent on the internet infrastructure of the host country. Such an infrastructure will vary depending on the host county’s investment into internet infrastructure and the limitations put into it. As such, it is quite possible that a host country could prohibit access to certain internet sites including online consular services. We must further note that even with a comprehensive internet infrastructure in their host country, OFWs have no guarantees to access internet voting due to technological requirements required for accessing the internet such as computers, internet subscriptions or availabilities of internet cafes. Similarly, while satellite internet may be available on the high seas, this is not a guarantee that Filipino seafarers will have access to it, not to mention that such a connection is expensive.

While internet infrastructure and access to it are inconsistent, the Philippines has a smart-card infrastructure in place for OFWs in the form of the OWWA OFW E-Card issued by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) as delegated by the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA). These E-Cards are comparable to that of Estonia’s, albeit using magnetic strips instead of SIM cards. OWWA OFW E-Cards could be integrated into the overseas absentee internet voting scheme if implemented. The Philippine legislature also has pending laws for the creation of a national identification card that could still be integrated with a SIM card-like technology similar to Estonia’s for possible future absentee internet voting schemes in the Philippines.

Because OFWs can likely expect inconsistent access to the internet, the internet voting scheme may be limiting internet voting to OFWs who are relatively well off and able to access the internet. Perhaps internet voting could be held as a parallel system in addition to consular polling and postal voting. To avoid redundancies, the POEA and consulates could consult the overseas absentee voters of their preferred options to vote beforehand and prepare accordingly.

Additionally, consular and satellite polling stations can be used as internet voting stations instead of physical ballots to save resources, as shipping electoral ballots and materials around the world can be costly and daunting. Consulates may even set up more satellite polling stations needing only internet-connected devices in order to reach more overseas absentee voters. Internet censorship issues in the host country can be resolved with virtual private network (VPN) or Tor network technologies that can legally circumvent censors and improve security. Another feature of internet voting is that unlike consular polling or postal voting, internet voting need not be geographically dependent, allowing OFWs with inconsistent addresses to vote regardless of their address or proximity to the consulate.

However, let us not get too ahead of ourselves as there are still a lot of security concerns involved with internet voting and a comprehensive feasibility study must be conducted to look at issues of security and availability to overseas Filipino voters.

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