Electronic voting and digital tools take over democratic elections

As the days go by and the world population learns to coexist with COVID-19, democratic processes continue their course and this November 3 all countries will fix their eyes on the US 2020 elections and its outcome between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

These events raise several questions in democratic terms, for example, how will the process be in the next voting or electoral obligations of the world? Thanks to the difficulties of displacement and contact that the pandemic is leaving, new ways of carrying out these processes without endangering the health of citizens must be considered. One of these alternatives could be electronic voting.

Precisely, in the United States, since Congress passed the Help Americans Vote Act (HAVA) the use of voting technologies is much more constant.

In fact, the decline of punch cards and lever machines accelerated, while the use of DRE, Direct Recording Electronic, an electronic voting machine that records votes by means of a ballot viewer equipped with mechanical or electro-optical components, soared and the growth of scanned technologies continued apace, according to MIT's Election Data Science Lab.

Technology can also provide a solution to the problems of impersonation that plague so many countries when it comes to controlling democratic events. This can be reinforced by means of:

• Smart cards to record personal information and biometric data.
• Systems to manage databases, when information is stored and managed digitally.
• Biometric information, such as fingerprints and facial recognition.
• Artificial Intelligence to generate transparent statistical processes.

How is Colombia doing with electronic voting?

Mandates for the implementation of electronic voting have already been established in the country, both by constitutional reform (Legislative Act 01 of 2003) and by law (Law 892 of 2004 and Law 1475 of 2011). However, to date it has not been possible to implement this type of alternative.

However, the development of applications and platforms has not stopped in the country. Companies such as Nuvu have a wide variety of tools that can be adapted to these needs. One of them is the Paperless technology, which allows the management of procedures and services through automated processes that eliminate paper and presence, supported by biometric validation technologies and natural language processing such as SingApp.

The GovTech ecosystem is one of the great beneficiaries if these practices are carried out properly, as once transparency can be demonstrated, citizens will increase their participation with e-voting and take advantage of its technological benefits.