The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) is holding a three-day conference to investigate the feasibility and desirability of an electronic voting system for South Africa.
The conference, which started on Monday in Cape Town, includes speakers from a number of countries, including Estonia, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, that have already implemented e-voting systems. Their insights will inform the IEC’s decision making on whether or not to incorporate e-voting into South African elections.
E-voting offers a wide range of benefits, including improved access for the elderly and the disabled and those in living in remote areas; a reduction in human error in the handling of ballots; and a significant reduction in the cost of running elections.
But there are potentially dangerous downsides to digitising the electoral process that could undermine the integrity of South Africa’s democracy.
“The ultimate goal of digital transformation should be to ensure that queues get shorter, not longer, on voting day,” said home affairs minister Leon Schreiber, who spoke at the conference about the role the implementation of a digital ID system will play in ensuring that an e-voting system will be less susceptible to identity fraud.
“The efficiency of any electronic system should be better, not worse, than the existing paper-based system. There is frankly no point in digitalising a process if it is going to be just as slow, inefficient and insecure as the manual, paper-based process that preceded it,” said Schreiber.
One of the areas where South Africa’s manual vote-counting system has advantages over e-voting is the amount of visibility afforded to electoral officials. When elections are held, each voting station has officials from all parties listed on the ballot present where the votes are counted, keeping all parties honest and helping identify any irregularities quickly.
Visibility
According to an IEC explainer on the counting process, result slips are then signed by the counting officer, independent candidate agents and party agents. Results are also verified independently by external auditors.
With an electronic system, this visibility goes away, putting the ballots at risk of being hacked remotely or being tampered with by any entity that has access to the voting system – at the risk of no one ever spotting that fraud took place.
Because of this, some countries are against electronic voting. The German constitutional court in 2009 ruled that the use of electronic voting machines was unconstitutional, citing the need for citizens to have a process that allowed for open scrutiny.
Read: AI deepfakes and SA’s fight to protect the 2024 election
“All essential steps [in the voting process] are subject to public scrutiny,” the court said in a translated version of its ruling. “When using electronic voting machines, the essential steps of the electoral act and the determination of results by the citizen cannot be made reliably and without special expertise.”
A lack of public trust is another barrier to the success of e-voting systems. India is a great example of this, where electronic voting machines have been used for certain constituencies since as far back as 1989 and gradually phased in until their first nationwide deployment in 2004. Despite widespread use, the system has received sharp criticism from political activists and the general public, who argue it’s vulnerable to hacking and has no verifiable paper trail.
Some countries, like France, are tentatively deploying e-voting, having used for the technology for citizens living abroad without adopting it for national elections for fear of manipulation. The Netherlands was an early adopter of e-voting in the early 2000s but discontinued its use in 2008 after security experts successfully demonstrated vulnerabilities in the system.
One of the reasons the IEC is investigating e-voting systems is the hope that easier access might help improve voter turnout and thereby bolster citizen participation in the electoral process and strengthen South Africa’s democracy in the process. But an electronic voting system may not be the only way to achieve this goal.
Read: IEC results portal goes blank in apparent glitch
“Declining voter turnout and increasing radicalism, including from those who seek to question the outcome of legitimate elections, are warning signs that we must do more to enhance public trust in democracy. Ultimately, it must be the goal of reform – digital or otherwise – to deliver a better experience to the end user if we are to protect the credibility and legitimacy of our elections,” said Schreiber. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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