INSPIRE
Digital Democracy and Online Voting for Sustainable Elections
Reducing the environmental impact of elections
Traditional paper-based elections require many resources that result in significant CO2 emissions and waste that can end up into the environment. The use of digital technologies can greatly decrease the impact of elections and make them more sustainable. In this post, we study the factors of traditional elections that pose a threat to the environment and analyze how digital democracy and online voting can help make elections more sustainable.
In order to understand the impact of an election to the environment, a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the whole process should be conducted. An LCA is a methodology that enables the study of the impact a product, process or service has on the environment (see Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) — Complete Beginner’s Guide for more information about an LCA). Although it is not the aim of this post to conduct such a complex analysis, we can distinguish some of the main phases and activities in the life-cycle of a traditional paper-based election that impact the environment:
- Election campaigning: During this phase the candidates publish their advertisements in newspapers, bulletin boards, and leaflets, they send letters to electors, distribute posters and other campaign materials, and participate in TV and radio debates, etc.
- Voting: Voters go to polling centers and cast their paper ballots. In the case of mail voting, the voters do not need to go to a polling center, but their ballots do have to be sent to their homes and then sent back to the counting facility.
- Counting: The ballots physically cast by the voters are counted and the results of each polling center are aggregated to obtain the final election result.
Considering these phases and their activities, it is easy to identify a few categories of elements that impact the environment: manufacturing, transportation, and facility maintenance. The table below shows the relation between the most relevant activities and their impact.
Implementing digital democracy and online processes may make it possible to largely reduce an election’s impact on the environment by minimizing resource use, replacing transport with telecommunications, and reducing the maintenance required for physical facilities. All the activities listed above can be implemented by online means and, consequently, the mentioned impacts (manufacturing, transportation and facility maintenance) can be strongly reduced or eliminated entirely. For example, the advertisements could be done on websites or through e-mail lists that do not require paper printing nor the transport of them via postal mail. Similarly, the votes could be cast online, so it would not be needed to print paper ballots and have voters travel to the polling place.
However, it must also be considered that the use of information technologies is not free if environmental impact either. These technologies require large datacenters, telecommunication infrastructures and end-user devices, such as smartphones or computers. All of this infrastructure has its own associated lifecycle and includes manufacturing of technological elements, transportation, and maintenance of facilities, i.e. the same categories we previously identified. However, the difference is that all of this infrastructure is not deployed for a specific election. Instead it is already deployed and used in a variety of other ways (i.e., hardly any voter will buy a smartphone just to vote, because it is very probable that they already have one).
To objectively know the impact of the two election alternatives, a study of the LCA of both cases must be done (see for example ETSI TS 103 199 for an LCA of an IT system). For the paper-based election, it is relatively easy to compute, because the impact of the activities performed can be easily quantified considering the type of election, the number of voters and the different activities associated to it. For example, there are studies and calculators of the impact of sending a postal mail, travelling, and the usage of paper that can be used to calculate a rough estimation of the impact. However, with a digital election, apart from considering the factors mentioned for the paper-based election, it is also necessary to consider the efficiency of the datacenters and telecommunication networks used, the energy sources used for their operation, the end-user devices required (some of them might be more or less sustainable), and the percentage of usage of all this infrastructure that can be afforded to election activities.
Overall, the impact of a traditional paper-based election is believed to be higher than the impact of an online election. Online voting and digital democracy only account for the usage of a small fraction of the already existing and operating IT infrastructure, while paper-based elections have many resources that are exclusively used for it.
This article was written by Jordi Cucurull (PhD), Cryptography Researcher at Scytl.
