Our high-stakes politics mean mobile voting is premature

A recent opinion piece in the Sunday Nation broached the option of voting in the next general election using mobile phones. 

It's an argument that should be reviewed, given that the IEBC talks are expected to get underway soon.

If Kenyans are securely transacting billions of shillings over mobile devices, the argument goes, they should be able to comfortably use the same device to cast a simple SMS vote in favour of one or more candidates.

A basic mobile app can indeed be cobbled together to allow a voter to identify themselves through their Personal Identification Number (PIN) and subsequently proceed to choose their preferred President, County Governor, Senator, Member of Parliament, Women’s Rep and MCA.

Proponents of mobile phone voting further argue that the country would save billions of shillings that would otherwise go to waste in procuring expensive gadgets that are designed to fail during elections.

Furthermore, the inconvenience of having to wake up very early in the morning and queue for long hours would be eliminated since Kenyans would be able to sit at home, press a few buttons and be done with voting, in less than five minutes.

So can mobile voting really happen in Kenya? The answer is both yes and no. "No" because a PIN is insufficient evidence that indeed it was you who actually cast that vote.

One may know the PIN of their spouse, child, friend or relative and therefore, could potentially vote on their behalf.

Of course we could argue that this is negligence, and that the errant voter should bear the responsibility for it, rather than prevent a whole country from moving forward on progressive mobile voting.

In any case, people already lose money by being careless with their PINs, which has not stopped other Kenyans from using both mobile money and ATM services.

PROVING YOU VOTED

However as the saying goes, the law is an ass and does not always reason like the common man.  Besides, the not-so-common man, otherwise known as a learned friend, knows exactly how the law works.

In the high-stakes game that our politics has become, it would take a junior lawyer just a few hours to file a petition seeking to nullify the election based on claims that his or her client had tried to vote but was denied, since the system assumed he had already voted.

His constitutional right to vote, the claim would say, was grossly violated.

IEBC would then be at great pains to prove that denial of access resulted from the plaintiff having voted earlier – something they would fail to prove, since PIN-based systems lack what is known as the ‘non-repudiation’ property.

Non-repudiation is the a property of a system that proves beyond reasonable doubt that a specific electronic transaction was indeed carried out by a specific person.

In other words, in valid elections, one must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the person who typed a given PIN and cast the electronic vote is indeed the anticipated registered voter.  

Without non-repudiation, the mobile e-voting fails the test of being free, fair, transparent and accountable and would subsequently be declared null and void.

Nevertheless, there are systems that can address the ‘non-repudiation’ property, and if we were to upgrade our mobile phone networks with such systems, they would be usable in an election.

Such systems are founded on technologies commonly referred to as the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and ultimately involve digital signatures that can be relied upon by a court of law to determine election disputes.

So yes, we can go the mobile voting way, but some prerequisite technological and legislative upgrades would be needed beforehand.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Email: [email protected], Twitter: @jwalu