The US could learn a thing or two from India鈥檚 all-electronic national elections, which concluded last week. In the world鈥檚 largest democracy, 650 million people had the chance to cast their votes on nearly a million e-voting machines. In contrast, only 20 per cent of the ballots to be cast in this year鈥檚 US presidential elections will be electronic.
Controversy continues to dog the US鈥檚 sophisticated e-voting machines. The complexity of the software makes it hard to spot bugs or any attempted fraud (New 杏吧原创, 14 February, p 6).
However, a mere glance at the short, simple software in the Indian machines would reveal any bugs, according to Swami Manohar, a computer scientist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. The machines avoid features such as touch-screen balloting and transmitting votes to a central server. Instead, they merely record the number of times a button for a particular candidate is pressed. 鈥淚 believe it was a terrific success,鈥� says Manohar.
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Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, an outspoken critic of e-voting in the US, says, 鈥淚 do believe that [the Indian] system is much better than the ones in the US, due to its simplicity.鈥� However, Rubin says the machines lack a paper printout of each vote that has been cast, which would allow voters to verify their choice of candidate, or scrutineers to do a recount if necessary.