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What is Online Voting?

A brief introduction to casting ballots online

At the end of any political term, millions of voters are called upon to cast their votes for their next political representatives. Unfortunately, many eligible voters will not be able to reach a polling station during the election.

Some are living abroad or are deployed in the military. Some have disabilities and face inaccessible polling locations. Some simply don’t have the means to take the time to vote, whether it be due to a job, to travels, or to living far away from a voting center.

But if citizens could vote from anywhere, and at any time, then these hurdles wouldn’t exist.

This is exactly where online voting comes in. It gives voters the possibility to easily and comfortably fill out and cast a ballot using their own personal computer or smartphone, allowing them to vote from virtually any location with Internet access.

How does it work?

For a voter, online voting is comprised of three main steps:

Registration

To register to vote, voters are added to an electoral roll of eligible voters, as with any election. They are then provided with credentials, such as a username and password, to access the voting system.

Voting

Voters can cast a ballot by opening the election website from an Internet browser, identifying themselves (with their username and password, for example), and selecting their voting choices. Then all they need to do is click on the “cast” button.

Verification

Verification is the last step, and it is usually optional, enabling voters to verify that their ballot was correctly registered by the voting system.

How is it secure?

In a world of hacking, threats and misinformation, one might think that voting over the Internet can be unreliable. However, online voting providers develop online voting systems so that they are easy for voters to use, yet extremely difficult for attackers to deceive.

In an online voting election, votes can only be cast by eligible voters. They are then encrypted on the voter’s computer or smartphone, just after they are created, and are kept protected until they are counted. Also, no vote can be added, modified or removed from the ballot box in order to alter the final election result. In fact, a state-of-the-art online voting mechanism should offer higher security measures than regular paper voting, as well as any postal voting system.

Why use it?

Although voting alternatives exist for those who can’t fill out a standard ballot on election day, they are far from perfect. Postal voting methods leave little room for slow mail services and have no way for voters to verify that their ballot was correctly counted and not tampered with. Similarly, services for people with disabilities usually require them to forfeit their voter privacy by asking someone to vote on their behalf or telling a poll worker which option they would like to elect.

Online Voting, on the other hand, offers the benefits of these alternatives without any of the drawbacks. With online voting, every voter is guaranteed an accessible and secure voting method, their votes remain private and confidential, and they can participate in an election from anywhere, at any time.

Internet voting, online voting, electronic voting… What’s the difference?

It is important to distinguish online voting (also referred to as Internet voting), from other forms of electronic voting. In their policy paper, Introducing Electronic Voting, International IDEA identifies four main categories of electronic voting systems:

• Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, such as those used in Brazil, India, and the United States.
• Optical scanners, such as those used in Canada and the Philippines.
• Electronic ballot printers (EBPs), such as those used in Argentina and Belgium.
• Internet voting systems, such as the iVote system used in Australia.

The main characteristic of the latter is that votes are transferred from the device used to vote (e.g. a computer, a smartphone, or tablet) to a central counting center via the Internet. While Internet and online voting opens the door for voters to cast their vote from any location (i.e. online voting in uncontrolled environments), some countries still limit the possibility to vote online to certain public computers (i.e. voting from kiosks in polling stations, diplomatic locations, public libraries, etc.).

It is also worth distinguishing online voting from other technologies that are sometimes used to make casting ballots remotely easier and more efficient. Some countries, such as the United States, allow voters to receive their ballots electronically, but have them print and fill out their ballot manually. This is known as e-ballot delivery. In some cases, voters can even fill out their ballots electronically (online ballot marking) before printing them out and sending them by post (or even by fax). Neither of these cases can be considered online voting, according to our definition, since the channel used to cast the vote is not electronic, but paper-based.

Countries may also allow ballots to be returned online, such as via e-mail or through a dedicated web portal. It is important to note that these systems, while similar to online voting, do not provide all the security features of advanced online voting systems, such as end-to-end encryption, anonymization techniques, and key-sharing mechanisms, nor do they provide individual or universal verifiability mechanisms.