#WitsPoll - was SMS voting the right choice?

The Wits staff and students are voting on Thursday to find out whether they want classes to resume. Photo: Kim Ludbrook

The Wits staff and students are voting on Thursday to find out whether they want classes to resume. Photo: Kim Ludbrook

Published Sep 29, 2016

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The good news is it is easy and immediate, the bad news is SA has already had two discomfiting experiences with SMS voting, says Colin Thakur.

Johannesburg - The decision by Wits to consult with their constituency on whether or not to recommence the academic programme must have been a gut-wrenching one. Everyone agrees with the merits of #FeesMustFall. Everyone respects the right to peaceful protest.

But while everyone condemns the wanton destruction of academic property, the burning and destruction continues unabated. And so, one has to ask: “Have there been any consequences to (even) Vuwani yet?”

The academic calendar is reaching the year-end, which has negative consequences to next year’s first-year intake.

What do we do?

To decide this we have to ask what precisely is the will of the constituency in this matter? (The writer uses the royal “we” because he is a parent of a Witsie even though he writes as a technocrat.)

The choice to use SMS voting for the Wits referendum is interesting, although SMS voting is neither a new nor a novel concept. At a cursory level the beauty of SMS voting lies in its immediacy, familiarity and its anytime-anyplace quality.

The clincher is that SMS requires no training or setup on the voter side.

Indeed two successful SA TV shows, Idols and The Voice, use SMS among other methods to collect votes.

Leveraging SMS to TV producers offers real-time revenue generation opportunities because the voter pays per SMS. The real-time distributed voting even promotes suspense and intrigue.

Electronic voting, also called e-voting, is the electronic casting of ballots and the electronic counting of ballots. This requires custom-built hardware and software.

Although SMS technology is not a custom-built voting device, it marginally qualifies as the e-voting option of choice.

SMS voting has even been considered in some democracies. The Indian state of Gujarat has made legislative changes to consider SMS voting as a way of mediating very low voter turnout for its local elections.

And SMS is used considerably in political campaigns to cajole voters to register, participate or to vote for a candidate.

The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) uses SMSs to allow a voter to check their voting status.

SMS voting belongs to a class of e-voting called uncontrolled voting. This means that a voter may vote from anywhere or anytime within the voting window period which, for Wits, was 7am to 4pm on Thursday September 29.

Controlled voting is what we South Africans are familiar with and is the voting site under secure IEC supervision. It includes a voting register, observers and a secret booth.

The sad news is that SMS is not safe. The encryption that network providers use for SMS transmission is nominal. Besides, the voter/sender will be able to show their SMSs to someone to show they voted, violating the secrecy principle which states that not only must a voter be able to vote in secret but that the voter must not be able to prove for whom the vote was cast.

SMS allows for “shoulder surfing” which means a voter may be coerced into voting in a manner contrary to their will. The idea of sending an SMS from a known cell number to a system and preserving the anonymity of the voter is difficult to achieve.

This also violates transparency, which asserts that a voter must understand the process. Impersonation is possible on a remote mobile device because we would know where the vote is cast, not who is casting the vote.

The decision to get the IEC involved appears to be the appropriate thing to do, although this in itself may place the IEC in a quandary. The IEC may in its own right only conduct and administer paper ballot elections.

The IEC cannot hold a politically binding election with technology such as computers or mobile devices as legislation makes no provision for this, not even to experiment.

However, instances like this demonstrate that the IEC should be empowered to begin the process of e-voting piloting and trailing especially for constitutional referendums.

The bad news, of course, is that South Africa has already had two discomfiting experiences with SMS voting.

The Idols 2009 rendition had two finalists - Sasha Lee Davids and Jason Hartman. During the final, SMS votes were transmitted and computed in real-time. M-Net then announced that Davids was the “surprise” winner. But a few days later a miscount was declared due to a miscalculation that excluded 200 000 votes which Hartman had received.

For fairness, M-Net decided to declare both contestants winners. They shared the same prizes.

This happened because of a concept called latency or store-and-forward. When a system is too busy, messages queue and wait to be delivered. The show was “live” and many people voted “at the last moment”. This is human nature.

When the auditors stopped the system to start counting, there were still legal votes with the correct time stamp waiting in the queue though not yet visible to the talliers.

A similar situation occurred in 2016 with the finale of the inaugural The Voice SA series. Here it was announced live that votes received on the night would not be counted because of "intermission problems" and only votes tallied up until Thursday would be used with some other changes. This violated the right to vote principle.

Fortunately Richard Stirton, the favourite, still won this event.

We have not learnt, though, have we? What guarantee do we have that Wits will not make a similar mistake? M-Net did it twice. Anything that goes wrong could drive the knife-edge situation into complete pandemonium.

On a positive note, 37 000 votes is a trivial number, although the service provider must be aware that many votes may well be cast in the last hour or even the last 30 minutes. Hackers may also orchestrate a denial-of-service attack during that critical voting period, slowing the system and inducing latency.

I would advise against counting at 4.01pm or even 5pm but then the electorate will ask: why the delay? Damned if you do, damned if you do not.

A hashtag is predictably trending over Wits Vice-Chancellor Adam Habib’s announcement of the referendum: #HabibsReferendum. The wry intellectual humour of South Africans prevails. At least.

* Dr Colin Thakur is a digital expert at the Durban University of Technology.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.

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