In the aim to override the matter of fact that e-votes results are not verifiable, some people suggest they could be "certified" that is not verified but only declared to be trustable or not, according to some info. We could safely accept certified results. There are plenty people claiming they are able to certify electronic elections' results provided we buy and use their software & hardware.

Unfortunately, we know very well that from the beginning of history men do the worst things to get the political (and thus economic) power. That's why the aim of any electoral mechanism should be to provide results that are in accordance with the will of the electorate, not to the will of those who manage the elections!

In elections errors and fraud cannot be detected from the fact they produce wrong results (as, on the contrary, it happens in most human activities), since correct electoral results are obviously not known in advance. Thus, the only way to certify an electronic electoral result is to ensure that the whole electoral process (machines & humans) is properly designed and built and that it has run without any problem in each part all the time until the end of all electoral activities.


Furthermore, we must not forget that even a perfect electoral mechanism can guarantee true results only if those who manage it are 100% honest!

In any case the process of certification, being very technical and complex, cannot be done by the public (as it happens for the counting of ballot papers), but only by experts in computer science and communication. Public opinion, in the lack of any tangible proof, has to trust their words and thus blindly accept their certification (obviously hardware & software vendors forget to say that).
Mistakes and/or fraud can be detected by public opinion only if results are evidently wrong: as single candidate getting 99% of the votes, or cast votes being more than electors. But, in case of tampering, nobody would give the public such evidently wrong results.

As things stand, we could contract the entire electoral process to someone we trust. A limited group of technicians could control the programs that produce the election procedures and the count, but that would certainly not be democratic monitoring, completely free of suspicion of pressure or illicit interest. In real life elections, governments entrust the control of elections to a company that lives on their contracts (usually the same company that produces e-vote equipment).

We would like to trust our government during elections, but we mustn't forget that democratic monitoring of the election process should be directed mainly not at individuals who might vote twice, or modify, or cancel a few ballot-papers in a few polling stations, but principally at the governments. They, in addition to having an interest in falsifying election results to their advantage, have the technical means, human and economic to do so, if public opinion cannot or will not exercise control.


Can we rely on their honesty in deciding who is going to rule over countries and million people, without even the possibility to be contradicted?


N.B. ENRON's fraud has been discovered because money is a physical and traceable object and thus investigators could find evidences of illicit transactions. On the contrary investigators can do very little about e-vote fraud since the only proof of elector's intentions are the recorded votes which, being unverifiable due to their anonymity, could already have been tampered with.