Sri Lanka to Amend Election Law to Introduce Electronic Voting
COLOMBO, 17 JANUARY, 2012: Sri Lanka is planning to amend its elections law so as to enable electronic voting, according to China’s Xinhua news agency citing Election Commissioner Mahinda Deshapriya on Monday.
Speaking to media, the official said said that the government is considering to amend the current election law so that it would be possible to initiate electronic voting instead of the laborious hand counting system that is in practice now.
“Large amounts of public money are spent on elections as they are done manually with the entire process needing many people and resources,” said Deshapriya.
“Thousands of people have to be deployed to carry ballot boxes, distribute voting cards, guard polling stations and monitor that the elections are not rigged. The largest number of public workers is needed to count and tally the results.”
The re-allocation of electorates and aligning of the system will enable electronic voting to be implemented in Sri Lanka, one of South Asia’s oldest democracies and the first in the region to get the universal franchise for women, said Deshapriya.
Source: Malaysian Digest
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very easy to cheat
21million people in country, for voting around 40% eligable i guess. So from that count do all the people knows how to use computers or electronic gadgets? If that is solved this is wonderful idea. But the server and the IT location should be outside the country.
Damian,
Can you please elaborate at what point easy cheating
point starts?
And to you Niyamasinhalaya let me remind you that “A journey of thosand miles starts with one single step”Let us take that very important step.When the Universal Franchise was introduced into our country we started with voting for coloured boxes for each candidate. Later we switched over to ONE single box with different symbols for each candidate. Now we have ONE box and one single symbol for each reconised party or a group pf Independant candidates.Each step is an improvement on the former and had its own birth pangs.I can remeber a story going round about an illiterate person casting his vote for the chair symbol placed his ballot paper on a chair.Such problems do occur. You and I use now use high powered electronic equipment to transmit our views on the spot and expect a comment world wide almost instantly.However I have my own reservations not on the procedure but on subsequent regulations such as making it possible for tha expatriates to cast their votes. But let us not oppose this procedure .
According to this news item, the electronic voting system to be introduced is limited to the method of counting votes only. This means counting is done by computer. I suppose the voting card will carry an electronic tag to enable counting by computer.
All methods have their draw backs. So one should not condemn this. We have to advance with times. I suppose vote counting in advanced countries are now done through computers. Hence we could also learn from them to progress, just as we have learnt from more advanced countries to progress in other fields. I suppose in advanced countries there are security methods to prevent cheating/election rigging. Hence, we could also learn from them to secure our electronic vote counting system, if introduced.
Electronic voting does not mean voting by computer. It is only limited to counting the votes through computers, in order to speed up the counting, without human error. But computers are also operated by people who could err/cheat or computers could err due to various reasons. I suppose there are security precautions to safeguard against such errors.
I am against voting to be extended to diaspora SL citizens, at the moment, due to possibility of wide scale cheating.
ND, We should oppose this voting being extended to expatriots as most of them have no interest in the development of SL in their hearts. In fact some odf them like the diaspora would do anything to stop our struggle towards Prosperity.Wide scale cheating is another factor altogether.We shall tackle the Darker Devil first.