People are voting these days. In Moldova, a small country of about 3 million between Romania and Ukraine, the next election is unusually important—both for domestic politics and for its tug-of-war between Russia and the European Union. Closer to home (for me), Switzerland is also voting. That happens a lot here: nationwide and cantonal ballots come several times a year: it’s “direct democracy”, an important aspect of Swiss identity. We have executive cabinets, we have parliaments but it’s relatively easy to put issues to a popular vote.

So Swiss citizens often go to say "yes" or "no" to many proposals, but this time the popular vote is particularly relevant: the results will have important economic implications—for public finances and for household budgets. Voters are weighing changes to how homes are taxed and, at local (cantonal) level, how the mandatory health-insurance system is financed. Of course the impact of a law is not limited to its economic effect, but the results of the Sunday ballots will shift real money around.

But it's not really Sunday. That's because many people vote early from home using postal ballots that arrive weeks in advance. On Sunday all the closed and anonymous envelopes will be opened and the ballot papers will be counted, with those from the minority that still prefer to cast their vote in person.

So Sunday is officially voting day, but everything actually happens earlier: you can read the official booklet at your kitchen table, mark your yes/no, and drop it in the mail. Quite convenient. And lately there’s been talk of making it even more convenient by letting people vote from their phones.

The temptation of e-voting

From a certain point of view the idea is not absurd: if we already bank, manage health data and sensitive information from a smartphone, why not cast a ballot too? The promise of secure, simple, cost-effective e-voting systems doesn't sound like wishful thinking, if we trust our smartphone for our checking account.

We must consider that security is where the trade-offs bite. My online banking doesn't need to be perfect, but robust enough to resist hackers motivated by my economic resources. I resist the temptation to joke that a ‘12345’ password would be sufficient for my bank account (the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage, according to Space Balls), but the main point remains: Influencing the outcome of a vote can be far more profitable than just logging into an online bank account. More importantly, user’s carelessness—which is the weakest point of all security measures—compromises only the money of the careless users but for voting procedures it can have an impact on collective decisions.

That’s why it’s considered acceptable to digitalize some processes (registration, delivery of blank ballots, counting of paper ballots) but not the returning of marked ballots: a U.S. National Academies’ report says that no current tech can guarantee secrecy, security and verifiability for Internet ballot return—the report is from 2018, but I don’t think the situation has significantly changed.

But let’s assume the best case: suppose we had solved all the technical difficulties, we had unbreakable cryptography and had made the servers airtight. Would that end our worries? Not entirely. Complex systems create perceived opacity that disinformation can exploit. A paper ballot has an “epistemic advantage,” as Casati and Tonello put it: anyone can grasp how a paper ballot preserves universality (any eligible person can vote), secrecy (no one knows how you voted) and integrity (each ballot really counts). It’s so clear and plain that I feel stupid to try to describe the process—explaining how an e-voting system functions, on the contrary, requires some time and requires some expertise.

You can try to sow doubt in any situation, but when the mechanism is visible and familiar it’s hard for that doubt to flourish; when there is something opaque, doubt grows easily. So digital voting can be a problem even if it's completely safe and secure: the traditional ways of influencing voting procedures—propaganda and disinformation, as is happening in Moldova—will be facilitated by the opacity of e-voting. And we’ve seen how narratives can corrode trust even around non-Internet machine systems. After the 2020 U.S. election, conspiracy theories targeted electronic equipment from Dominion Voting Systems. Those claims collapsed in court, but the damage to trust outlived the facts—a warning about how fragile confidence can be when the process feels opaque.

Since we’re talking about hybrid systems: I’m intentionally not speaking about the problem of coercion outside polling places. Inside the polling station you are protected from relatives, employers, criminals, etcetera; outside anyone can control and force you to vote in a certain way —but this problem also affects non-digital remote voting like the one we have in Switzerland where you can sign the authentication sheet and even sell at auction the ballot—it’s illegal, but it’s also hard to control.

Turnout isn’t everything

Why e-voting? It speeds up ballot counting—and I admit that knowing the outcome of a vote minutes after the closing of the polls, instead of hours if not days, is tempting. But at the same time I cannot stop asking myself if it really makes a big difference. I imagine it could save money: initial costs are much higher, but the marginal cost per polling is (at least I hope) smaller. Yes, we transfer money from the local economy (the staff of the polling stations, typographies…) to big companies—which I consider a huge disadvantage—, but overall we might save some money.

A digital and remote voting system is perhaps more suitable for our society, where it’s common to spend part of our lives away from home (and from our polling station). But the main argument for e-voting is raising turnout which is very low in western countries. In Switzerland it is often below 50%: more people do not vote than vote—and all of them can vote from home.

Does voting from your phone actually raise turnout? The best evidence says: not by much. Estonia’s long-running online voting program mostly shifts votes from paper to digital rather than mobilizing new voters; effects on overall turnout are modest or null across many studies. Maybe the abstention is not a question of convenience, but of engagement and trust (that, as we said, maybe is endangered by e-voting).

But again, let’s assume that online voting raises the turnout: are we sure that this is the goal, to have more voters? Or perhaps what we should really pursue is having engaged voters? I believe the latter: our objective should be to have voters who know what they’re voting on—and making voting too easy risks leading us to superficial decisions.

A complex ritual gives us the idea of an important decision that’s worth committing to and researching. It’s the same principle by which marriages aren’t celebrated with a click on an app, but require time, reflection and a series of formal steps. Introducing obstacles is often the best solution to avoid impulsive or unintentional decisions: many programs keep emails in limbo for a few seconds before actually sending them, and before deleting a photo the smartphone asks us if we’re really sure we want to do it (and even here it often leaves us a few days to recover it). To decide which politicians will have to approve laws or govern a state, I’d say some extra caution is justified.

Of course, it would be naive to think that all democratic choices made at the ballot box are thoughtful and rational—we’re not rational beings, even when voting requires us to set aside time to go to the polls. But it’s more likely that we’ll dedicate less mental energy to a vote for which it’s enough to open an app on our phone.

Paper voting at polling stations may seem anachronistic: why in the smartphone era do I have to go to a specific place at specific times? Yet this “inconvenience”—or others more suited to a highly mobile society like ours—leads to taking voting seriously. When I have to plan to go to the polling station, when I have to organize myself to find the time, I’m already making a small investment in the decision. It’s a powerful psychological mechanism: the more effort we put into something, the more we tend to take it seriously.