ALMOST everything around us has gone digital and the Covid-19 pandemic has only served to hasten the pace of digitalisation of services.
Prior to the Movement Control Order in mid-March, there were still not that many people who ordered food online. Now, almost everybody has tried it.
It's the same with online groceries. Streaming services like Netflix are experiencing a boom because people can't or won't go to the cinemas.
Many educational institutions treated e-learning as an afterthought before the pandemic struck. Now, it's a crucial part of their programme.
There's one area where digitisation has been rather slow — elections. In Malaysia, elections are still 100 per cent offline, done manually. But what the Sabah state election has shown is that voting can be a health hazard when done in the midst of a pandemic.
Sabah is now the worse-hit state in terms of infections. Many of the clusters we now have in the peninsula can be traced back to Sabah.
Perhaps it's time the authorities seriously look at implementing e-voting. There's still enough time to get this done by GE15, assuming there's no snap election.
The main concern about e-voting has to do with fraud and hacking. Indeed, security is one of the key concerns expressed by the Elections Commission in January when talking about the topic of e-voting.
Let's look at voter fraud first. When done offline (manually), voter verification is by way of showing your IC. You go into a booth and use a pencil to mark who you want to vote for.
You get some purple ink on your thumb to make it clear that you've already voted. This process is remarkably low-tech but it works.
A more high-tech way of voting can be done by way of electronic voting machines like they do in Brazil. It still requires voters to go to the polling booths and show their identification cards before they're allowed to vote electronically.
The main advantage of this system over the paper version is the speed and accuracy at which votes can be counted. But since it requires voters to go to polling stations, queue up and vote in person, it's not really e-voting in the way that online voting could be.
VERIFICATION TECHNOLOGIES
Digital identification and authentication are crucial for ensuring an accurate and credible vote count.
The good news is identity verification technologies are very well established and available right now. It's not like this is something that's still waiting to be invented.
One country to look to when it comes to e-voting is Estonia, a world leader in e-voting.
Since 2005, Estonian citizens have been able to vote electronically as well as through the paper ballot from anywhere in the world.
All they need is a government-issued smart card which any citizen can apply for. It's said that some 98 per cent of the citizens have this smart card.
The online voting system is so popular that almost half (46.7 per cent) of the population uses the country's e-voting system these days.
The other concern has to do with hacking. If the system is online, it is by definition vulnerable to hacking.
However, there's a technology that can very effectively tackle that problem. It's called blockchain. You might have heard of this in connection to Bitcoin, but it can also be used for more than just cryptocurrency.
It's called "blockchain" because it stores information in blocks in an ordered chain.
Basically, it's a kind of distributed ledger technology where its records are open to inspection and isn't subject to any form of centralised control.
The beauty of this technology is that it can allow voters to verify that their votes have been recorded correctly and counted without compromising the secrecy of who they are and who they voted for.
The decentralised nature of blockchain technology makes it much more difficult for hackers to manipulate the election results.
It also helps that a blockchain-based system allows for independent monitors to audit the vote counting to ensure that there's no fraud.
ONLINE SYSTEM
Digitising the electoral system of a country is always going to be challenging and will be met with skepticism by many parties, from political parties to individual voters, because it's something new.
People were sceptical of using credit cards for e-commerce at first but over time they got used to it. Now, people order things online all the time.
If you go back a little further, you can probably remember your parents or grandparents or uncles or aunties who didn't like using ATM machines because they preferred to conduct their banking over the counter.
But there are too many downsides to offline voting and too many upsides to online voting for the digital revolution in voting to be ignored.
The key to making it palatable to a voting public that's new to this is to introduce it as an option, not a replacement for offline voting.
That's how Estonia did it. The idea is that e-voting gives the electorate more options to vote.
If they can't vote in a polling station for whatever reason (they might be abroad or sick or working overtime), they can still vote in the comfort of wherever they may be.
It's also helpful when an electorate is largely digitally-literate and familiar with using all kinds of services online.
Then doing e-voting won't feel so alien. In that regard, it shouldn't be a problem with Malaysians as many do engage in online transactions such as e-commerce, online banking and so on.
Some people may say the digital divide will disenfranchise many rural voters, for instance.
But don't forget, digital doesn't just mean computers. A robust online voting system, like the kind they have in Estonia, works on mobile too. Many Malaysians — including many in rural areas — have mobile phones.
Besides, as mentioned earlier, having an online voting system doesn't do away with offline, paper-ballot voting. That will still be there. The online system is merely there to complement it.
So far from disenfranchising voters, an online system would make voting more accessible than ever before. It's time Malaysia looks into this.
Oon Yeoh is a consultant with experiences in print, online and mobile media. Reach him at oonyeoh@gmail.com.