Disclosure of computerised voting information from public elections

Without public disclosure most people have very little information on voting details. Some people have access to more detailed information, due to court actions, for example, but only a few have access to all the data. This creates unfair advantages for those with access, distorting the democratic process. For example, allowing exclusive analysis to decide on future campaign strategies or predict who will be elected if a casual vacancy arises. Furthermore, there are many ways in which the public can directly benefit from public disclosure. Some of these are outlined below.

Validation of election results

Manual counting of votes from public elections is scrutinised to detect errors, accidental or otherwise. This is not adequately done with computerised counting. The source code of the software currently used for counting votes has not received public scrutiny. Even with such scrutiny it would be reasonable to be concerned that some bugs may persist. Public disclosure of data would allow independent validation of election results using third party software.

Data security

Public disclosure of raw data, preferably with secure digital signatures, enhances security of the data. Because multiple independent copies will be made, and loss or corruption of the original data can be detected and corrected. This is particularly important when filling casual vacancies by "countback" (see below).

Filling casual vacancies by "countback"

The better electoral systems fill casual vacancies by examining additional preferences indicated in the original votes. This makes access to the original data particularly important. Public disclosure counters unfairness (exclusive prior knowledge of who will or would be elected) and data corruption.

Analysis of voters' concerns

Some idea of the issues which concern voters can be determined by just seeing who get elected. More precise analysis can be done using the details of the preferences each voter gives. Some sketchy data of this form is often gathered by scrutineers when ballot papers are examined. Public disclosure allows the concerns of the voters to be determined more precisely, and (hopefully) acted upon by their elected representatives.

Other analyses

In the longer term, analysis of data from multiple elections may reveal significant historic/geographic/demographic (et cetera) insights. Public disclosure will prevent potentially valuable data being lost.

Improvements to counting rules

Current rules for counting votes have been developed for counting votes by hand and are a compromise between easy of counting and democratic values. With computerised counting, technically superior rules are feasible and have been implemented. One obstacle for their introduction is lack of data from actual elections to demonstrate how they would work and how often the results may differ from current rules. Public disclosure would overcome this.

Education

The data from actual elections can be useful in civics education. It can provide better motivation for students compared with artificial data.

To summarise, full public disclosure of the raw data used for electronic vote counting in public elections

1. safeguards the integrity of and confidence in the electoral process, and
2. provides a source of information which can be used to the benefit of the public in many ways.