To e-vote or not? International cyber chiefs are split

One panel of government speakers at this year’s Singapore International Cybersecurity Week was divided on the benefits of digitalising voting systems.

But the panel was on the same page when it came to how the rise of information threats has made it more challenging for governments to use technology to engage their citizens.

On one camp was Brazil, which has a long history with the electronic voting system – having first experimented in 1980s before officially implementing it in 1996.

Malaysia, on the other hand, cautioned about the risk to public trust when it comes to bringing the voting system online.

“We really need to establish that element of trust because once it’s divided, it’s quite difficult to gain back,” said its National Cyber Security Agency’s Chief, Ir. Dr Megat Zuhairy bin Megat Tajuddin, in the panel.

Despite the country’s high Internet penetration rate, he shared that an electronic voting system brings about “added concern” and that its risks outweigh the benefits.

The panel, titled “A Vote of Confidence: Trust in the Digital Era”, took place on October 15.

GovInsider spotlights Brazil’s experience of securing its longstanding electronic voting system, and how governments around the world are tackling with the common threats of misinformation and disinformation.

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Are e-votes more secure than paper ballots?

Security systems must evolve alongside the electronic voting system, said Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Head of Cyber Defence and Security Division, Larissa Scheneider Calza, who highlighted that the government has taken a cryptographic approach to cybersecurity for the system.

Cryptography refers to the practice of coding communication to protect messages and information between authorised recipients.

In Brazil, electronic voting is conducted via microcomputers that are not connected to the Internet. The microcomputers have built-in security features that make it impossible to identify who one has voted for, and are designed to be simple to use for citizens.

The main impetus to shift from paper ballots to electronic votes in Brazil was to promote democratic inclusion, given the high illiteracy rate at the time, as well as to reduce fraud, reported Democracy Technologies.

Calza noted that digitalisation also adds to a layer of security as it is more difficult for one to tamper with votes on the local level, since the votes are directly transmitted and tabulated by the central election agency.

Brazil’s electoral court’s Information Technology Secretary, Julio Valente, previously told BBC that the country’ electronic ballot box goes through several tests with researchers, software experts and external investigators to try to break its security.

As of 2022, more than 20 experts have tried to penetrate the system but failed to do so, the report added.

How Brazil raises trust in e-voting

Currently, Brazil has over 150 million registered voters. At a recent election at the municipal level, Calza shared that the results were fully tabulated within two to three hours.

“The timely results have also been very important. By not having a period of limbo [with physical counting], we can ensure confidence in the system,” she explained.

For a large country like Brazil, she added that having the ability to tabulate these results accurately and quickly has played a role in ensuring greater stability.

In some ways, digital technologies might also be easier to implement, both from the efficiency and security perspectives, she noted.

A previous report by rest of world shared that prior to Election Day in 2022, the Electoral Court launched four apps to increase trust in the process and make access to voting easier.

These apps included a poll station locator, poll tracking apps by geographical area and candidate results, and a reporting mechanism that can be used by members of the public to alert authorities of illegal activities like voter fraud.

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Misinformation: Common threat to all governments

Despite their contrasting views on electronic voting, the panelists shared that misinformation and disinformation can reduce public trust in voting systems.

The Netherlands’ Ambassador-at-Large for Security and Cyber, Ernst Noorman, for one, highlighted that the malicious use of artificial intelligence (AI) to generate fake news has led to much distrust in the public information ecosystem.

This undermines the potential of digital technologies to be used for democratic engagements, he said.

“While it’s not widespread, certain pockets of the population are distressed by misinformation as a whole. So, we have been mainly dealing with misinformation about the voting machines,” said Calza.

As the government cannot control the information threats out there, it is important to ensure that Brazil has a digitally literate population as people cannot trust what they do not understand, she added.

“Everyone needs to have at least a basic understanding of how the [voting] machines work and the basic notion of cryptography [to secure the system],” she explained, adding that there are public education campaigns to achieve the abovementioned objectives.

But she acknowledged that the government still faces an issue despite there being no substantiated claims on problems with the voting system.

Information threats not exclusive to e-voting

Calza emphasised that such information threats are not only exclusive to countries with electronic voting.

For example, according to fact-checking website PolitiFact, court documents found that in about half of the charges for the January 6 US Capitol riot, misinformed beliefs influenced the attackers to act on them.

The riot was carried out by supporters of former President, Donald Trump, on the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC, after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election and claims of rigged elections – although a majority of the country's votes are conducted via paper ballots.

But she also acknowledged that part of the success of Brazil’s longstanding system had been its implementation at a relatively less polarised time with fewer information threats for the government to deal with than today.

However, with technology here to stay, she cautioned other governments to carefully consider the use of electronic voting in elections.

Early this year, the Electoral Court approved a resolution to regulate the use of AI in elections, making Brazil "among the first efforts worldwide to regulate generative AI in an electoral context,” wrote DFR Lab.