Next time you vote, you might be using an electronic machine instead of making your mark on a paper ballot.
The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) is investigating electronic voting in the country and how it might improve the election process.
This week, the IEC held a three-day conference in Cape Town about e-voting systems, which – not surprisingly – have been hugely positive for the countries which have used them.
Will you cast your electronic vote?
Estonia, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo all gave enthusiastic reports of how much easier – and, significantly, cheaper – electronic voting is. Instead of a ballot for every voter, you only need to print one ballot per voting machine.
Those machines are reusable, so the cost of printing tens of millions of ballot papers is removed.
This is obviously the most notable benefit, but there are numerous others. Apart from saving on costs, it reduces the risk of human error in counting the ballots; while these machines can be used just as easily in remote rural areas as a Joburg suburb. They’re easier for the elderly and disabled to use too.
“The ultimate goal of digital transformation should be to ensure that queues get shorter, not longer, on voting day,” Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber said at the event.
“The efficiency of any electronic system should be better, not worse, than the existing paper-based system. There is frankly no point in digitalising a process if it is going to be just as slow, inefficient and insecure as the manual, paper-based process that preceded it,” he said.
