The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf government wants to make good on its election promise to get overseas Pakistanis to vote in the elections. The government wishes to amend Section 94 of the Elections Act, 2017. The said provision mandated the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to “conduct pilot projects for voting by Overseas Pakistanis in bye-elections to ascertain the technical efficacy, secrecy, security and financial feasibility of such voting”. The ECP has since then amended the Election Rules 2017 to add Rules 84A to 84C, which lay down the procedure for overseas Pakistanis through internet voting (i-Voting).

The Supreme Court of Pakistan (SC) in Reference Constitutional Petition No.2/2018-SCJ pertaining to the voting rights of Overseas Pakistanis, convened a session to discuss the i-voting platform developed by the NADRA. On the direction of the apex court, the ECP constituted a task force (IVTF) on April 19, 2018, to undertake a technical audit of the iVOTE platform.

The IVTF published its report on October 14, 2018. The main findings of the report were as follows:

First, iVoting compromises secrecy of the ballot.

Second, casting votes outside poll-booth environment enables vote buying and vote coercion.

Third, users can easily mount attacks on this system to manipulate votes at a large scale.

Fourth, attackers may create doubts in the mound of voters with fake and misleading emails. In addition, distributed denial-of-services attacks are persistent. Lastly, the third-party security components in iVOTE can be exploited by attackers.

Subsequently, the Election Commission was summoned by the Supreme Court in CP No 74 to 79 of 2015, to report on the progress made in this regard. After the submission of the report and presentations by the Election Commission and the NADRA in these proceedings, the Supreme Court allowed voting of overseas Pakistanis to be carried out through i-voting. This was conditional on the premise that “if the ECP is not satisfied about the integrity, safety and reliability” of the votes cast through this system, they may exclude such votes from the elections.

Overseas Pakistanis are a huge help to our current account through their remittances, however, the only implementable way to allow them to vote would be through a mail-in-ballot system.

Such is the integrity of the right to vote in the United States of America that the first internet vote was cast by astronaut David Wolf through e-mail, from the space station Mir, in the Texas election of 1997. Since then, many countries have attempted the introduction of internet voting, only to go back to the traditional system after the particular cycle of elections. In the 2013 parliamentary elections in Norway 250,000 Norweigians were given the opportunity to vote from home via the internet. Norway dismantled this system after secrecy of the ballot was called into question. There was also the risk of international meddling in light of alleged Russian involvement in the American presidential election of 2016.

Online voting was also tested in Australia in their local elections but issues of sabotage and compromised anonymity were brought up by academics and cyber-security researchers alike. I-voting was also a hotly debated topic when it was tested in Estonia. Researchers from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor analysed the system and recommended that “Estonia discontinue use of the I-voting system”, because “attempting to stop every credible mode of attack would add an unmanageable degree of complexity”. Another report from the University of California-Berkeley also concluded that internet voting “cannot be made secure for use in real elections for the foreseeable future”.

There are those who disagree, a report by Carlton University prepared for Elections Canada concluded that “while there are valid concerns that should be considered and thought out in the development of a given model, the successful operation of internet voting in other jurisdictions shows that it can be implemented and, in fact, improve the electoral process for electors and election administrators”. Moreover, Team Plymouth Pioneers – Plymouth University recommend the use of Blockchain Technology to remove the risk of hacking in i-voting, subject to identifying a 51 percent attack as a potential threat to their proposed design.

While the case for internet voting is arguable – especially attractive for the PTI which sees a significant support base among overseas Pakistanis – the transparency concerns are quite real. In the context of Pakistan where the ECP will inevitably need to rely on non-proprietary software developed by third parties for safety of votes and/or their casting, i-voting may not be the right direction to head into. The introduction of this technology will further lower the declining trust in democratic processes. Overseas Pakistanis are a huge help to our current account through their massive remittances, however, the only implementable way to get them to vote for now is through a mail-in-ballot system. That is, until such time when an effective, safe and reliable ways of conducting elections through the internet have been implemented at a mass scale in the developed world.

The writer is a graduate of the Columbia University and a High Court Advocate. He can be reached on Twitter at @shahmeer3192