E-Voting: The Resistance of Third World Countries Make No Sense

While e-voting is becoming popular in global elections in big numbers, some countries are still reluctant to embrace it.

The cultural lag present in third-world countries is stopping global citizens from making a paradigm shift towards this all-important type of voting.

This low attitude towards technology is not surprising at all, seeing that the technological revolution challenged the core beliefs of the status quo in today’s world.

And when they see the opposing voices and voter restriction laws passed from the first world countries, their faulty belief wins an endorsement.

Most poor countries remain poor for a long time, and their reluctance to change with modern times is one of the reasons for this.

How can e-voting worldwide change the way global elections works? Let’s see.

Read More: How Voters Evaluate Political Candidates Before Elections?

BRICS is an alliance of international players and some of its powers have embraced e-voting systems. However, South Africa is still hesitating to do it, which depicts the country's cultural lag.

BRICS: Nations so Close, Yet so Far

BRICS, an alliance of some of the emerging political giants, has restructured global politics in many ways.

While India and Brazil, two important members of this alliance, have successfully embraced this e-voting culture, South Africa, yet another BRICS power, has yet to debut this type of voting.

The African nation recently rejected the electronic voting plan, hence pushing the country back to square one.

This is a significant blow to the country’s democracy, where voting rights remain a hot-button issue.

Cyber attacks are very common even in the first world countries which encourages many third world nations to negate electronic voting.

Cyber Attacks Against Global Powers: A Reason for Resistance Against E-Voting System

The actual problem with stakeholders ignoring e-voting is the cybercrime attacks against some of the top-notch electronic facilities of the world.

For instance, they question how a simple voting machine present in some third-world country be safe from hackers when global systems like US oil pipelines are being attacked by cybercriminals.

Logically, their assertion can never be denied, as the risk of hackers attempting an attack on devices even without the internet can never be ruled out.

But this may serve as an eyeopener for global politicians as they have to cope with increasing cyber crimes even without adopting e-voting.

So for them, accepting electronic voting will become a blessing in disguise as they will try to resolve cyber security problems on a top-notch priority.

Some politicians cry foul after losing their elections, and they tend to believe in e-voting system, which also discourages the idea of this type of voting.

Politicians Crying Foul Pushes E-Voting Efforts Backward

The second most pervasive hindrance in actualizing the e-voting system is the habit of some political parties to cry foul every time they lose an election.

Most politicians will always find a way to gather a big crowd in the third-world countries to protest against so-called election rigging after losing e-voting led elections.

This creates public sentiments against the use of technology in elections, giving birth to conspiracy theories and the construction of popular opinion that e-voting is nothing less than a curse.

But in the long run, e-voting seems to be the only way of conducting elections, even in some remote corners of the world.

For instance, 100 years down the line, no country can expect to stick to the paper vote model where voters have to go to the polling booth, wait in a mile-long queue, and find the candidate of personal choice on a ballot paper.

At the end of the day, every country will have to bandwagon with the technology, sooner or later.

Electronic Voting is a Blessing in Disguise for Third-World Countries

Looking deeper, the e-voting system provides the solutions to fake and bogus ballots as well. Artificial Intelligence (AI) for facial recognization has already been developed and is a tested technology. 

Dodging such a system is now becoming increasingly difficult. In third-world countries, the issue of fake ballots is omnipresent where even the votes are being cast by already dead people.

Using AI for facial recognition can resolve this issue once and for all, as no one will be able to vote for some other person. The same is the case with biometric verification as well.

The third world countries need to dig deep into the potential which e-voting provides to democracy in the country.

Final Thoughts

Sometimes, the poor attitude of the first-world countries towards e-voting also encourages the third-world nations to resist these modern-day practices.

For instance, despite having some top-notch technologies in the world, Canada does not allow e-voting in its federal elections, which motivates the anti-voting groups and strengthens their evergreen speculations.

The post-modern economies will have to embrace the change first to set a precedent that the lesser-developed nations would follow.

If they fail to do it, the emerging countries will never entertain such modern-day practices.