Page III: India reports success, while Venezuela fears fraud. What can the world learn?
The country's electronic ballot box was designed with the prevalent method of voting fraud in mind. To prevent the use of voting machines to cast false votes after a party takes control of the polling place, the official in charge can throw a switch to shut down the voting machine, cutting it off from accepting any more votes.
"Voting is a cherished tradition there," said Michael Shamos, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. "Mobs regularly break out on election day, so you have to make the systems trusted."
It is impossible to gauge with any accuracy the possibility of fraud in the Indian national elections in May and June, but very little violence was reported in a vote that changed the guard to a government led by the Indian National Congress from a coalition led by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Moreover, the country faces other challenges, such as developing voting machines that are easy enough for the country's one-third illiterate populace to use, as well as reliable and cheap to produce. India opted for push-button electronic counters rather than on high-tech computers for the country's far-flung 670 million registered voters in the last election.
While Venezuela checks voters' identities by scanning fingerprints and comparing them to a central database, India prevents multiple voting merely by marking each voter's fingertip with indelible ink. And to aid the illiterate, the ballot was basically a list of parties adjacent to their symbols.
Open source and Australia
Australia offers yet another type of technology in its version of electronic voting. While India and Venezuela have largely relied on black boxes, Australia believes that the best way to get citizens to trust e-voting machines is to keep no secrets.
1%
4%
