YoungAction for YouropeVision
Civic Tech
Geoffrey and Cloé-France
Electronic voting is done locally. You have to
go to your polling station and present
yourself in front of a terminal that offers to
do your civic act by tapping on a touch
screen, according to the instructions given on
the screen. But voting machines do not solve
the problem of crowds and the surface to be
touched can be infected.
However, a large number of voters do not
trust these electronic voting systems, notably
decrying the ease of being able to modify or
hack these electronic systems and thus bias
the votes.
Due to recent events related to covid-19 and the
inability to bring large numbers of people
together in one space, governments have sought
among the Civic techs to find ways to resolve
issues related to the maintenance of the various
democratic elections. Could online voting or
electronic voting on dedicated machines be a
solution?
For the 2020 municipal elections, in no way: the
deadline is far too close today for us to envisage
the large-scale deployment of a global voting
platform (because we do not imagine that the
alternative is to set up a voting site by
municipality, given their number: more than
34,000), which is both secure, easy to use and
resilient. These two voting methods are very
different: in the case of online voting, voting
takes place remotely, from home and by
connecting to a site.
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