Electronic voting in South Africa: A risk too soon - Terence Corrigan
Key topics:
IEC proposes shift to electronic voting
Risks of fraud, mistrust and manipulation rise
Paper ballots seen as safer, trusted option
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By Terence Corrigan*
Change is invariably unsettling. As trying as any existing circumstances may be, they often have the virtue of familiarity. The familiar is understandable and navigable, its alternative daunting and uncertain.
Along with the unfolding and inherently unpredictable changes in the political environment, proposals are on the table for major changes in the management of elections, with the Electoral Commission (IEC) proposing the adoption of an electronic voting system.
In brief, this would change the method of voting, from the current marking of paper ballots and their manual tabulation to some form of device-dependent process. Voters would input their choices into a device at a polling station – or more rarely, over the internet – which would then be able to tally them. The objective, set out in its discussion document, is for an altogether better electoral system: “The implementation of electronic voting in South Africa presents an opportunity to modernise the electoral process, enhance voter participation, and ensure the integrity of elections.”
But with such change will come matching uncertainties: these attaching themselves to and compounding the broader anxieties in the country.
Technology is a tool. It makes life easier, reducing human responsibility for arduous tasks, and multiplying human capacity for the more cerebral. Information management has been the great innovation of the past half-century, and now plays an indispensable role in our lives, individually and collectively. It is precisely this form of technology that the IEC’s proposed voting system will try to leverage.
It is, however, a largely impenetrable form of technology. Engineering that magnifies muscle power through steam or electricity – a bulldozer or a railway locomotive, for example – can be observed and its broad principles grasped, even if the specifics of operations are more complex. Such machinery is, after all, merely a continuation of the practices humans have employed since times preceding current civilisation.
Technological change
Information management is a technological change. The processing of information intrudes into the very heart of what it means to exercise human agency. It is also one that takes place in systems that most people will not comprehend more than superficially. Indeed, there has been a long tradition of cultural apocalypticism, with machines rendering humans obsolete, or artificial intelligence running amok.
More than this, as much as information technology has done a great deal to make life easier, it has also come with some very real, present-tense problems. Cybercrime has become a serious threat to companies and individuals alike; banks and websites regularly warn about online scams. It’s a malevolence that takes place quietly, sometimes imperceptibly (until, of course, it’s too late) and is perpetrated by actors more skilful with the technology than their victims. Many can personally testify to the damage this has done.
The same principles are at play when technology is applied to the political process. Just as technology has taken bank robbery online, so too can it do so with electoral malfeasance.
The prospect of South Africa adopting an electronic voting system naturally comes with these concerns. The IEC itself repeatedly notes that the success of such a system hinges on ensuring its integrity and shielding it from penetration. Venezuela’s elections have been marred by irregularities in its systems. This is a real risk, and it is partly for this reason that the IRR, through the indomitable Dr Anthea Jeffery, has argued against adopting electronic voting.
With appropriate design, the IEC seems confident that a fail-safe system can be achieved in South Africa. Perhaps it can. But the system’s actual functioning may well prove beside the point.
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Polling evidence
South Africa is a low-trust society. There is a considerable amount of polling evidence that its people have little belief in the rectitude of their peers and institutions. Sadly, the conduct of the country’s governance and politics has done little to engender trust. South Africa’s people are visibly cynical about the manner in which they are governed, and they are frustrated by the abuse to which they have been subjected.
Any major new initiative will be met with suspicion. A new voting system will face an especially severe challenge, and never more so than at the current moment. Many voters will see the new system as a way of fixing the election in favour of a declining ANC: its last-ditch attempt to hold on to power. Even this, though, may not be the extent of the problem.
Elections produce winners and losers. South Africa is moving into an era in which past winners will need to accept losing. Whether they will do so remains an open question.
True, the ANC has in the past accepted the adverse verdict of electorates, in Cape Town (and a good many other municipalities besides), in the Western Cape, and nationally in last year’s election. But each of these represented a partial and (in the view of the party) temporary loss. It responded to the realities of the 2024 poll by simply pushing ahead as though it remained in sole control. A more definitive defeat may be more difficult to finesse.
The danger exists that at this point, a mauled ANC – taking, say, a 30% vote share – would confront the very real danger of being definitively excluded from power, and with it, from the crooked patronage machines in which many of its leaders are enmeshed. For some, there would be the additional danger of their unstated immunity from prosecution vanishing, and of not having a sympathetic minister and correctional service hierarchy to expedite their way through the penal system, should it come to that. These are large stakes.
In the face of all this, the temptation will be one common to any number of defenestrated political miscreants: to cry foul and allege conspiracy. It would be difficult to think of a more convincing exhibit than a new and unfamiliar voting system, a new and mystifying technology with a semi-comprehended vocabulary. Add to this the glitches that are well-nigh inevitable – a machine failing here, an IEC official misunderstanding the system there. The system has been, one might hear, “hacked” by those same imperialist plotters the party has been warning about for decades.
Receptive audience
This would probably find a receptive audience. It needn’t convince everyone. It might just be able to generate enough outrage and frustration to get crowds onto the streets, and to disrupt the incoming government’s legitimacy. Indeed, such a strategy need not be orchestrated by the whole of a party, just by a few influential people within it. It also doesn’t need to come from the desperados of a failing ANC. It could be from some other aggrieved or opportunistic formation. The MK Party is already in on this strategy, having peddled the claim that the last election was rigged and stolen.
And it needn’t be genuine or evidenced. Academics Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron have described a phenomenon called the “liar’s dividend”. When enough falsehood is in the air, and trust sufficiently eroded, it becomes hard to sort fact from fiction, or to make confident, informed judgements. It’s a strategy for the guilty to evade accountability, and for the bad actors to gain the initiative.
For its part, the IEC acknowledges that public confidence in a new system would be imperative. It proposes an intensive programme of voter education. This is misguided. South Africa’s challenge is not merely that the technology and voting system would be unfamiliar, but that this unfamiliarity stands to be weaponised. At this juncture and in the present context, it’s hard to see how this would be overcome. In any event, the Commission itself does not escape the country’s trust malaise, with Afrobarometer’s latest enquiry finding that only around a third of South Africans express a degree of trust in it. An early victim of the liar’s dividend, perhaps?
The solution is simple. Retain, for the moment, the existing paper-based system. It’s hardly perfect; human errors slip through, and there is also almost certainly some fraud. But it is a system that has weathered several decades. Political parties and civic groups have developed extensive expertise in monitoring its conduct. Its processes and procedures are familiar and it produces a verifiable audit trail.
Navigating times of uncertainty is difficult, and never more so than when it is paired with stress. It is no small administrative matter to alter the way in which representatives and government are chosen. It is about the quality, character and endurance of democracy. Elections have overwhelmingly been viewed as legitimate, up to this point. And at this point, South Africa cannot afford to jeopardise this legitimacy.
*Terence Corrigan is the Project Manager at the Institute, where he specialises in work on property rights, as well as land and mining policy. A native of KwaZulu-Natal, he is a graduate of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg). He has held various positions at the IRR, South African Institute of International Affairs, SBP (formerly the Small Business Project) and the Gauteng Legislature – as well as having taught English in Taiwan. He is a regular commentator in the South African media and his interests include African governance, land and agrarian issues, political culture and political thought, corporate governance, enterprise and business policy.
This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission