Will we find ourselves revisiting the image of a government minister digging around piles of jute sacks, looking for lost votes? Will the Likud spend weeks chasing a lost seat? Will the Central Elections Committee once again report chaos in the process of counting soldiers' votes? We haven't even gotten over the embarrassment of the last time, and the startup nation is once against about to hold an analog election, full of glitches. Israel, a world pioneer in high-tech, cyber, and digital innovation, is still spiking paper ballots and counting votes by hand. That doesn't include the tens of millions of shekels spent on printing the ballots, which is only part of the logistics expense of transporting the ballots to polling stations and counting them after the election.
We could avoid the embarrassment and the doubts. In the digital age, all 1,200 vote counters in the central election headquarters can be identified by a smart card. The results of their count could be authorized by a secure digital signature, and voting could be carried out in a method that is fitting to the age we live in.
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Computerized, secure elections are not a complicated technological challenge. Every eligible voter would undergo a one-time identification process and then would simply press the button of the party he or she chooses. The fear of fraud or cyberattacks can easily be countered. The polling places' digital voting systems would not be internet-enabled or connected to any other outside system. This mechanism of voting is already in use in Estonia, and there have been no issues of fraud or suspected fraud there. When the polls close, each polling machine tallies the votes cast, under oversight – each of the party representatives present at the polling place would use their smart cards.
A copy of the numbers confirmed by the party representatives would remain with the committee of each polling station. Another copy could be sent to the district branch of the Central Elections Committee or the main committee office in Jerusalem as an encoded digital file or even via a courier. Today's computers are capable of carrying out the final count and making quick calculations and statistical analyses, and saving candidates, journalists, and the public, in general, a lot of annoyance.
Israel has a wonderful opportunity for a corrective experience. We can prepare ourselves for digitization that would prevent us from another embarrassment: digital identification of the 680 members of tallying committees at the district and national levels; digital identification of the 1,200 vote counters in the Central Elections Committee; digital identification of every party representative at every polling station nationwide; a digital voting pilot at a few polling stations; and finally – precise, mistake-free digital voting at all polling stations participating in the sample results, as well as digital voting at all polling stations nationwide.
