Pakistan's Internet Voting Experiment
This addresses the problem of enabling voting for overseas citizens in Pakistan, but it is incremental as it reports on existing trials without proposing new solutions.
The paper examines Pakistan's small-scale trials of a remote Internet voting system for overseas citizens, documenting sociopolitical, legal, and institutional factors, system vulnerabilities, and new materiality issues, with the potential to create the world's largest enfranchised diaspora if deployed in general elections.
Pakistan recently conducted small-scale trials of a remote Internet voting system for overseas citizens. In this contribution, we report on the experience: we document the unique combination of sociopolitical, legal, and institutional factors motivating this exercise. We describe the system and it's reported vulnerabilities, and we also highlight new issues pertaining to materiality. If this system is deployed in the next general elections, as seems likely, this development would constitute the largest enfranchised diaspora in the world. Our goal in this paper, therefore, is to provide comprehensive insight into Pakistan's experiment with Internet voting, emphasize outstanding challenges, and identify directions for future research.