Phlogiston Blue - Head in a Virtual Cloud...

Head in a Virtual Cloud

The recent elections in the UK, and in particularly the low turn out, seem to have brought the 'digital is the solution' crowd out of woodwork. Internet voting is, as it was after the Florida fiasco in the states, being touted as the silver bullet that will get people voting in their masses.

Is this really the case?

Various people have pointed out some of the fallacies involved in the arguments for Internet voting. Most of these revolve around questions of security and whether digital identification is good enough. If you can't secure the voting infrastructure and uniquely identify the voter, how can you verify the results?

I don't think many people would argue with the view that the Internet is insecure, and there have been attempts to suggest that people should be able to vote at automatic cash machines. Buying votes acquires a new twist! The idea was quietly dropped when it became clear that it was unworkable, but that didn't stop the enthusiasts from continuing to plug their silver bullets, all of which assume that the voters are going to behave like some kind of rational computer making no mistakes.

The real problem with these arguments, though is that they miss the whole point. The security/ identification issues are not even in the loop - what matters in the first instance is the access to the Internet.

Let's look at some real figures. The population of the UK is about 60 million. Let's be conservative and assume that a third - 20 million - are under voting age, not registered, or otherwise ineligible to vote. That leaves us 40 million voters to process. At the moment about half the population are on-line, but the pundits predict that virtually everyone will be on-line by the next election. I have my doubts, but lets knock 5 million off for technophobes and such like - so we are down to a potential 35 million votes to process.

The polling stations are open from 7am to 10pm on polling day. Obviously this may change and the hours be extended, but we will work the assumption that they won't be, given the political vested interests involved. So there are 15 hours available to vote in - that's 15 x 60 minutes = 900 minutes.

So, 35,000,000 / 900 is just under 39,000 voters a minute!

But that's only a start. I have to confess that I'm a long time member of the Labour Party (old Labour, not new) and I usually work in one of the local committee rooms on election day. Now it just happens that those of us that work on elections regularly have a rule of thumb about voter turnout patterns. It reflects experience accumulated over many elections. It is that about half the voters who are going to vote have voted by 6pm - the other half vote between 6pm and close of poll.

So what does this do to the figures? Well it means that we have to process about half the votes - say 17 million - in just four hours (240 minutes). That's over 70,000 voters a minute. This is not looking good! We can get computers capable of handling that volume of transactions, but will cash-strapped local authorities be able to afford them?

But we are not at the end yet, although I freely confess we are moving out of the realm of hard figures now.

What happens when you have something to do that you can do over time, with a fixed deadline? Let's say that the online voting - which should just take a couple of minutes - is spread over a couple of weeks, with a deadline of 10pm on the 'election day'. Lets be realistic - most people will leave it till the last moment. I would hazard a guess that several million people will leave it until the last five to ten minutes - especially if it turns out to be a close election and people think their vote is likely to matter.

Well, yes we can get (at a price) machines capable of handling hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of transactions a minute. I'll leave aside who is going to pay for these machines and the cost of getting genuine mission critical software, which can't be given a test run. Processing of the votes isn't the real issue.

The real issue is Internet access. Remember earlier on I said that about half the population are on-line? This is the case, but the unasked question concerns the quality of their access. The truth is that most of them use free providers, and have frequent access problems. Virtually every one I know who uses a free provider has access problems - so much so that they are taken for granted.

Even more fascinating, is the fact that none of them were interested in my suggestion that they use a non-free provider, even one charging as little as Demon's £10.00 a month. The Internet is an optional extra to them, if it wasn't free, they probably wouldn't bother.

Now, given that most free ISPs can't handle their regular traffic, what do you think is going to happen when (say) a million people all try to log on to vote at the last minute? Frankly I doubt that the ISPs have even enough modems to cope, let alone enough bandwidth. The resulting fiasco would make the Florida chad affair look like a masterpiece of good planning.

While we are on the subject of elections, I thought I'd share a little snippet with you. I was chatting to a campaign worker from a nearby constituency. He's the guy who looks after their PC, and does the elections stuff on it. "It's very slow", he admitted. "We used to have a DOS program that did all the election stuff, but Milbank [Labour Party HQ] decided it needed upgrading and sent out new Oracle software, which takes four times as long to print out the material."

Given that most of the computer stuff for an election involves printing material for use by canvassers and people who do the knocking up on election day, it wasn't difficult to see why the volunteer was looking so long in the face. I don't know why it is, but it seems that whenever the Labour Party (or any other party for that matter) touch IT they always mistake image for content. Obviously photo opportunities for the leader to be seen with Larry Ellison of Bill Gates are more sexy than those with Richard Stallman...

Alan Lenton

Read other articles about computers and society

Back to the Phlogiston Blue top page