Electronic democracy
Where we learn that the old Swiss forms of direct democracy are probably still the safest voting methods, except if one uses the emerging blockchain technologies.
Once a year, the inhabitants of certain Swiss cantons gather in town squares to decide on a number of political items. And they do so by raising their voting cards! This is an amazing example of direct democracy and a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit such a « Landsgemeinde », as this assembly is called, in the small canton of Glarus. Seeing 8000 people deciding if or not to install bicycle paths (turned down) or new sports facilities (tacitly accepted) is quite an experience and it reminded me that voting is a tricky process.
Let’s look at the voting method itself. Imagine you had two candidates running for office, it is obvious that a majority vote would decide the winner in a way that exactly reflects the voters’ preference. But even with just three candidates things would become difficult. For example, if 60 percent of the people dislike the first candidate, but are otherwise evenly split between liking the second and the third, then the first candidate will win with 40 percent of the votes, even if the majority would hate him (this is actually what Al Gore painfully discovered in the 2000 US presidential election, when George W. Bush won with the majority of votes split between Gore and a minority candidate).
In fact, there probably exists no optimal voting method that completely guarantees the wishes of the majority (this is also why there are so many voting methods worldwide). But can we at least improve the counting? Maybe with electronic voting systems? In theory, yes. Like many other internet services, you could log in to a public server and deposit your vote there (so no need to shop up on an election weekend and go to the polls any longer). And this would lead to a perfect count. But then again, such a centralized electronic version would require some security checks, such as passwords, or ideally even a double authentication. But even then, such a system could be hacked.
The good news is, however, that there now is also a decentralized and more secure version of electronic voting. This is based on the famous blockchain method, which is so popular with crypto-currencies right now (for more information on this see the previous columns). But a possible application of this new technology might actually be the electronic version of a democratic vote. Since with this method, a voting system that is very hard to hack and to manipulate, and perfect to count, could be envisaged. What you would still not be able to optimize, are the rhetorical means. Just like at the “Landsgemeinde” in the small canton of Glarus.
