Rick Falkvinge backs electronic voting but warns of potential for abuse if the process goes entirely online

In 2012, a contest for US schools to win a gig by Taylor Swift was hijacked by members of the 4chan website, who piled ​on its online vote in an attempt to send the pop star to a school for deaf children.

Now, imagine a similar stunt being pulled for a general election, if voting could be done online. Far-fetched? Not according to Rick Falkvinge, founder of Sweden’s Pirate ​party.



“Voting over the internet? Would you really want 4chan to decide your next government?” he said, during a debate about democracy and technology in London, organised by the BBC as part of its Democracy Day event.



Falkvinge was responding to a question about whether online voting – or even voting from smartphones – would encourage more people to vote. Besides online pranksters, his reservations included the potential ability of governments and security agencies to snoop on people’s online votes.

“Surveillance is so ubiquitous, we are at a crossroads. Yes, technology can be used for good, but we are also in a Big Brother society well beyond the nightmare dystopias of the 1950s,” he said.

“Searching online is as close to a mind-reading machine as we’ve ever come. And that is now eavesdropped by governments. We are arriving at a point where the government has the ability to hold you accountable for how you vote. That is a 180-degree reversal of power.”

​His fellow panelist Arvind Gupta, head of social media for India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), agreed. “It should be private: your vote is a secret ballot. We have to ensure privacy and the secrecy of the ballot,” he said.

The debate’s co-chairman, technology journalist Bill Thompson, added that “the risks of adopting an unknown technology are so enormous, we may be better to stick to the known restrictions… paper ballots are broken in ways that we understand”.

However, Gupta and Falkvinge praised the growing use of electronic voting machines in elections, where voting still takes place in person at poll stations rather than over the internet.

“If you have a vote over the internet, the government is unable to make sure you don’t have an abusive spouse behind you telling you how to vote, or an employer behind you telling you how to vote,” said Falkvinge.

“You need that physical space that the government ensures, so you have privacy and your own conscience. Once you have that, then you can go electronic… a machine that prints a ballot with your options, which is machine readable, and then you have the paper tray.”



The merits of electronic voting machines, and their potential for fraud, has been discussed widely in recent years, including in India. However, Gupta said that the technology has not given cause for concern so far.

“In India, we have close to 2.2m electronic voting machines. If there is a malfunction in a couple of them out of 2.2m, I think that’s not a concern. I think that’s overplayed,” he said, adding that the ability to get results “in real time” in a country with more than 815 million eligible voters is a step forward for democracy.



The BJP won a landslide victory in the 2014 election in India, although the run-up to the voting saw heated debate about the role that social media would play in the campaigning process.

“In the two years preceding, there was a concerted effort to first discredit the medium, and to stifle free speech – to ban the medium and put a lot of restrictions on it,” said Gupta.



“But the same set of people are now realising the importance of open, free media, and social media as part of that … We’ve seen the voting percentages go up more than 10 percentage points.”



The panel also talked, albeit all too briefly, about the potential impact that large internet services – and Facebook in particular, with its news feed algorithm – may have on democracy. For example, whether the social network could influence voting patterns by hiding or showing certain stories from its users’ news feeds.

“If we’re getting too dependent on certain tools, certain platforms from a technology perspective, does it present a risk that these platforms under pressure of legal guidelines can influence democracy in a manner that we cannot predict?” said Gupta.



“It’s a worry. Today these companies have a lot of control over our thinking process. Instead of a printing press having control, it’s probably now an online platform that has control over how we think and how we work.”

“It does bring a light to what power exists today with single players,” agreed Falkvinge.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rick Falkvinge Photograph: BOB STRONG/Reuters/Corbis

A separate question about whether social networks are creating “filter bubbles” as people only follow others who they agree with politically was batted back by Twitter’s general counsel Vijaya Gadde, who was also on the BBC panel.



“I think you can see by the vigorous debates that happen online, including the Scottish referendum with more than 7m tweets. I don’t think it was an echo chamber. It was a debate between people who had very different ideas,” she said.

Gadde also said that Twitter has learned a number of lessons from criticism in 2014 over its response to online harassment, with the treatment of British MP Stella Creasy cited as one example of trolling so intense and abusive that it risks driving people away from social media.

“There are definitely lessons we learned from that incident about making sure we create a safe environment for our users,” said Gadde. “If you let vitriol go unchecked, you’ll find trolls are marginalising the same voices that we’re trying to give a platform to speak freely.”



Gadde added that high-profile examples of Twitter users like Creasy being harassed have led to changes in the company’s policies, response times to complaints and its product features.

Questioned about whether electronic surveillance of social networks by agencies including the NSA and GCHQ is damaging for democracy, Gadde pointed to Twitter’s decision to sue the FBI and US Department of Justice in October 2014 in able to publish more details about government requests for user information.

“We’re trying to take a stand here, but it’s something that citizens need to take a stand on too,” she said.



The panel also focused on politicians’ growing use of social media to listen to voters and join conversations online, as well as explaining their policies and beliefs.

Emma Mulqueeny, founder of Young Rewired State and a commissioner for the Speaker’s commission on digital democracy, admitted that some politicians remain intimidated by social media.

“I don’t know whether it’s resistance, so much. There’s fear: fear of the unknown,” she said. “The fear of not knowing how to use social media or even their emails. Their fear of that is taking them away from looking at digital.”



Falkvinge agreed, saying that he still sees politicians in the European Parliament “getting their emails printed for them by their secretaries, making them think they know what the internet is all about. And these are legislators who have their fingers on the yes or no button.”

However, Mulqueeny and Falkvinge agreed that it’s important for politicians to conquer their fears and technical ineptitude, to ensure they aren’t seen as irrelevant by the voters who are going online to learn about and discuss political issues.

Specifically with young people, they are unbelievably political, because of social media they have seen things put in front of them on their Facebook pages that we never saw. So they do care about things,” said Mulqueeny.

“Politicians claim young people have no interest in civil issues, but we have never ever had a generation so eagerly, intensely and passionately discussing the society they live in. They are just disinterested in discussing the last generations problems and their solutions to their problems,” said Falkvinge.

Is there a risk of a digital divide between people who are and aren’t comfortable with the internet, which could be harmful for democracy? Mulqueeny said she wants to reframe that whole debate.

“The divide for me is between real life and digital life. I don’t understand why people can’t understand that online digital is as real as us sitting here. It’s not a separate thing,” she said.

“Bullying online is the same as bullying offline. Illegal practice online is the same as offline. If we don’t engage properly with technology in a democracy, the people who are going to be left behind are the digital natives: the people who are used to communicating and influencing and learning in this space. Not those who don’t.”

Falkvinge called for more positivity in the way technology’s impact on democracy is reported, though. “There is fear of the unknown, and people are exploiting it politically. The internet is not something strange: it’s an amplifier of human nature,” he said.

“Yes, there is vitriol online, and there is hatred online. But that’s so much smaller than all the helpfulness, friendship and love online. People are helping each other more than at any time in history, and that’s shaping something beautiful.”

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