E-Voting for Election Day? Why Not?

As you guys know yesterday was the Election Day and it was an intense fight between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney. However, it turns out that Mr. Obama won yesterday election and will lead our country for four more years (Yay!). Even though I am not from United States and do not have the ability to vote, yet I do feel that Mr. Obama would be better choice for us. Obviously, I am here not to talk about my political stance, but instead there was one innovation from the Election Day that amazed me a little bit. They started to use E-Vote (Electric voting) to collect all of our votes which is very cool for me. This is actually my first time experiencing the Election Day here in United States, so I have no idea whether they already used electric vote or not last time. However, I do know that in my country (Indonesia), there is not such a thing, we still do it in a traditional way which use a sheet of paper that has a picture of the president we are voting for. It is amazing to see how fast the technology has grown, I wonder how Election Day would look like 24 year from now, and it must be really awesome. Prior to vote, the voters will receive a barcode in which they will need to swipe it to the computer which has the E-vote software in it. After that you will choose the candidate that you want to vote and then hand sign it at the very end. This software will only allow one vote each voter so that he or she will not be able to vote twice using different computers.  For those of you who wants to know more about how E-Vote works in a more detailed article you can read Internet-based and open source: How e-voting works around the globe article by Cyrus Farivar. It has a very detailed explanation about the history of this system and how it actually works.

Sadly though, every innovation must have pros and cons and yes, E-Vote has its own flaws as well, many people argue that the votes could be hacked or manipulated by someone that has the authorization to check the vote (Could e-Voting Machines in Election 2012 be Hacked? Yes. By Mark Clayton) which would be a very serious issue if there was anything like that on the Election Day. Furthermore, many experts believe that software bugs or malicious software can be another issue (Clayton), this software bugs will be able to get inside the system and alter the result of the vote which will become a major loss for the losing candidate and his or her supporter.

At this point, you guys might wonder what I am trying to say on this post. Well, as you guys already know, I am majoring in Information System and this should be a very interesting innovation for me, because it really giving my discipline more options in term of work-field. Like what I've told you guys above, we are anticipating that there might be a major flaw that need to be worked on and this is a good for Information System and Information Technology discipline because now the presidential office should hire someone that could work on the database to make it much more secure and solid. There should be a way that will prevent those votes to be hacked or even seen by anyone in the office.

There was another issue on this event which is the voting lines. There are many complains about how long the lines are, people talk about it on their Twitter, Facebook, or maybe blogs. There is an article in ABC News that talks about this issue," People in states like Florida and Ohio waited up to seven hours. In other states, there were shorter, though still-frustrating two-to three-hour waits. Some experts place the blame on high turnout, but many will tell you the culprit is technology -- failed and faulty e-voting machines." This lines show how people are aware of the possibility of faulty e-voting machines and this is a very great opportunity for those IT people to get a new job. I believe that with a better database and preparation system this issue should be able to be fixed.

Yet, with all those flaws that the system has, I still believe that E-Vote should be maintained and improved further, because technology is our future and I believe that E-Voting will change people perspective about the Election Day. I can recall seeing my parents avoiding the Election Day due to the fact that the process takes almost their whole day and I remember how my dad always babbling about how long it takes for us to know the result. E-Vote can be the solution for all the inefficiency; therefore, I believe that if we can figure out how to reduce the waiting line to the minimal limit and use a solid and advanced security system, there should be no reason for us not to like this innovation. Image if we have the capability to minimize all the Election Process to only five or ten minutes and by the end of the day we will be able to know the final result of the vote, it would be fantastic and I believe that it would increase the number of participants who use their right to vote.