Peter EspeutI DO not understand the confidence that is being placed in electronic voting to prevent bogus elections. The keystone of the new system is that the ballot will only be printed once the voters fingerprint has been matched by the computer, and so ballot boxes, they say, cannot be stuffed from the night before. Who are they trying to samfie?
True enough, when the fingerprint is matched, a ballot will be printed by the election computer; but what is so special about that computer and the ballot it will print? Give me a sample of what the ballot will look like and I bet my computer can print you a thousand of them! And of course, certain members of all the political parties will have samples of the ballots long before election day. Ballot boxes can still be stuffed the night before with computer-generated ballots identical to the ones generated after fingerprint identification. And if they are using special paper, it can be obtained, just like the political hacks got genuine ballot papers for midnight box stuffing. Do they take us for fools, or what?
But these purveyors of bogus elections are not fools. Many of them spend hours and hours thinking up ways to beat the system. They know that this billion dollar system will not prevent electoral fraud. So why are they encouraging wasteful spending on this elaborate new technology? There must be a good reason, and I think I know what it is. Rather than curing the disease of bogus voting, which is endemic in our political system, electronic voting will simply make electoral fraud harder to detect!
We do not know exactly how the system will work, but it frightens me when I hear that with electronic voting you can poll your vote anywhere in Jamaica. This means that they intend to do away with the ballot box. If I live in Kingston but vote in Lucea, will they have a ballot box from my PD there for me to put my ballot in? Of course not! It is the computer which will register my vote. If they do away with ballot boxes, how then can they have recounts? We will have to take whatever the computer tells us as fact; there will be no way to challenge it or to verify it. The perfect samfie!
The person who writes the computer programme has the result of the election in his or her hands even more definitely than the person who controls the passwords. The computer programme could have hidden in it a command which turns every other PNP vote entered into a JLP vote, or vice versa; or every other NDM vote into a PNP vote; or only for certain PDs or constituencies. Or the operating system could contain a second way to get in (a back door), that bypasses any elaborate security feature, allowing all sorts of shenanigans. The software code actually used on Election Day needs to be closely examined for operations which will bogus an election. The possibility exists that the software examined so closely before, may be substituted on Election Day; after which the original is replaced; a tidier way to bogus an election than by stuffing boxes. And all undetectable!
Let us not be impressed by high-tech demonstrations, like simple children being bamboozled by a conjurer. There are all sorts of intelligent questions which we must ask, and all sorts of new checks and balances which we must put in place, before we adopt electronic voting in Jamaica.
So much wasted emphasis has been placed on systems, on technology. I have been calling for emphasis to be placed on the people, on the election day staff. But nobody is taking me on. As I have said before, no machine can substitute for honesty. Election computers have to be operated by human beings, and if ballot-stuffers are put to operate them, what can we expect? We saw a few years ago that the EAC and the Electoral Office could not prevent corruption during simultaneous polls in four small Parish Council divisions. With the eyes of all Jamaica upon them, and after spending 17.5 million American dollars, the Electoral Office still had immense difficulties on electoral day for a re-election in one constituency, West Central St. Andrew.
Electoral fraud is a criminal offence, yet I have never heard of any election day staff being arrested and charged. Why have they not been asked to give statements explaining how irregularities took place in front of their noses? Is it that, faced with the threat of imprisonment, they might tell what they know and incriminate politicians? But that will not be allowed to happen, and so we send the signal that corrupt election day staff will be protected by their political patrons, and the corruption continues. Will they and others known or suspected to have been involved in bogus voting be banned from duties in future elections?
Let us not forget that members of the police force corrupted by politics have assisted in electoral irregularities. I am convinced that there will be no solution to the problem of electoral fraud - no matter how many computers we buy - until the police force is cleaned up.
Unless we can ensure that election day staff are honest, electronic voting will make no difference. Unless we can ensure that those who have worked at polling stations where bogus voting has taken place are prevented from causing mischief and subverting the democratic process, then the bogus voting will continue. I am very suspicious of those who advocate electronic voting without also insisting on honest staff. Putting ballot-stuffers to run election computers will make it harder to prove election fraud without necessarily reducing the incidence of fraud. I am more convinced than ever that the PNP and the JLP who have created a culture of corruption in this country, have no intention of taking us out of it. Do not let yourself be fooled by any Samfie Man!
Peter Espeut is a Sociologist and Executive Director of an Environment and Development NGO.
