The first reaction, when Irene Pugliatti, CEO of IDTechnology, declares that their electronic voting platform Eligo is used for seven votes every day is one of disbelief: is it possible that there are all these elections?
The fact is that the word “voting” almost automatically refers to political elections which, although more frequent than normal in Italy, are in reality the tip of a gigantic iceberg, which sees us as voters (and possible elected representatives) in dozens of opportunities: from class representatives in middle school (probably the first grade of our life), from school to high school, to the choice of management bodies of professional associations, union representatives, municipal and neighborhood councils, associations, assemblies condominium etc.
There are dozens of bodies, public or private, which must carry out votes, deliberative and elective assemblies envisaged by regulations and statutes.
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Essential tools for participatory democracy, no doubt. But which sometimes risk having the opposite effect: if out of 3,000 eligible to vote, 100 vote (a far from infrequent case), what kind of representation can the elected officials boast? Isn’t there a risk of leaving these offices (and the more or less large shares of power that follow) in the hands of a few, who “exploit” laziness or lack of familiarity with the mechanisms of representing the majority of the lazy-uninformed?
This is the terrain in which Eligo operates: there is no doubt that an easy and secure method of electronic voting greatly increases participation, “in some cases, explains Pugliatti, even by 100 or 150%. Especially in the case of small elections we have had cases where 100% of those entitled to vote actually voted”. And, as Giorgio Gaber sang, “freedom is participation”.
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Digital voting has in fact become a practice used by hundreds of public and private entities, with a foreseeable boom during the pandemic, “but contrary to what we expected, the market held up last year as well, which means two things: that those who try it never go back and that our customers are on the increase, regardless of the contingent situations” explains the CEO.
Eligo is a pioneer of the electronic and online voting market in Italy, with a secure cloud and web-based platform validated by the court of Rome and the Privacy Guarantor born in 2005 and which today allows you to create and manage any type of vote and deliberative and elective assembly, in hybrid form, full-remote (i-voting) or at polling station (e-voting).
In particular, Eligo is dominant in the University sector, in which it holds 75% of the market, and in professional orders (30%), including that of Journalists.
Security and ease of use, we said. The first is obviously fundamental and is the hardest psychological obstacle to face with users. “Not so much with customers, who do all the necessary checks before choosing us, as with voters: they are afraid that by not using a paper ballot, it will be possible to match the vote to the voter, a thread that in “normal” elections it stops when the ballot falls into the urn. In reality, with the Eligo platform, the voting and voter information is immediately split and saved in two separate areas. Furthermore, any logical, physical or temporal correlation is definitively lost upon confirmation of the vote in the digital ballot box: in practice we digitally reproduce the act of inserting a paper ballot into a ballot box, making it impossible to reconstruct any correlation between the vote cast and the voter , with the advantage that the ballots cannot be marked in any way by the voter, effectively eliminating the void ballots” explains Pugliatti.
The theme, currently on the agenda, of possible hacker attacks remains. “And that’s why we currently consider the political vote to be another game, with different rules: an arena we prefer not to enter for the moment. Political voting requires much higher levels of security, which would result in unsustainable costs. But there is another problem: building an unassailable system, even regardless of the costs, is not impossible, but it would require such technological barriers as to make the voting operation extremely complex, with the result of risking having even fewer voters than the vote paper, and therefore, paradoxically, a more impressionable vote”, explains Filippo Pugliatti, Strategic Product Manager of IDTechnology (the company that produces Eligo).
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The second theme is that of the user interface. And it is the main innovation of Eligo Next, a new version developed after more than a year of studies, research, interviews and collaborative planning. Starting from the analysis of users’ needs and the changes that have taken place in the respective contexts of action – especially pre- and post-pandemic -, an important investment has been made in improving the usability of Eligo, reshaping the voting and management process of the vote, so that it is even simpler and more immediate. In the new version, each step of the voting operation offers an interaction and a visual design that accompany the user in the learning process of the electoral rules. Each phase of the preparation and configuration of the electoral event has an even more intuitive and flexible interface also for the organizers, always in compliance with legal and regulatory and safety constraints.
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Online primaries, split Pd: what electronic voting is and how it works
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Last but not least, electronic voting also offers advantages in terms of costs and sustainability: there is no longer the need to move dozens of people to set up polling stations or simply to vote, the use of paper is zero. Finally, time: the counting of ballots takes place in a few minutes and disputes are practically reduced to zero.