The Nationalist Party is taking a cautious approach when it comes to electronic voting following revelations last month that people who bought Maltese citizenship made it onto the electoral register without satisfying the minimum residency requirements.
PN sources told the Times of Malta the party would only agree to use ID cards for voting, instead of the traditional voting document, if political parties were allowed to carry out audits on Identity Malta’s ID card processes.
Last week this paper revealed that after reviewing the complaints filed by the PN, the Electoral Commission had conceded that 39 out of the 91 complaints were justified.
The use of ID cards to vote would be the first step in a host of new technological measures in the local voting system.
Both major parties have concerns about electronic voting. The main issues are ensuring that the system would not allow the electronic traceability of an individual voter’s choice and avoiding fraud. This challenge is exacerbated in online voting.
The Labour Party said that, to date, online voting was far from protecting the Constitutional requirement of voters’ absolute secrecy.
On the other hand, the PN proposed in its good governance document a pilot project for online voting to establish whether it is a system that can be safely and transparently used in elections in Malta.
The Electoral Commission aims to replace the voting document with the ID card and have e-counting in place for the 2019 European Parliament and local council elections.
While the PL said it was open to evaluate and consider the use of IT in all its facets in order to improve the electoral process, the PN affirmed its support for the introduction and use of IT in certain electoral processes, subject to having all safeguards and security measures in place.
The PL also said it was cooperating with the Electoral Commission in order to draw up the best possible proposals aimed at changing the manual counting of votes with an electronic counting process.
Last June, the Electoral Commission issued an international request for information for the development an electronic vote counting system. The parameters included the retention of the current ballot system, where voters list their preferences by writing numbers on a paper ballot sheet.
These sheets would be scanned and dubious ballot papers filtered out. They would then be counted by computer software rather than the current array of counters.
It is being estimated that the reform would half the €4 million election price tag.
Five companies expressed their interest in developing an e-counting system; three have put forward their proposal to a technical committee composed of the Electoral Commission and the political parties.