Digital Unbounding of the Polling Booth: Ethnography in Small Places

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how a small place – the polling booth – can be bounded as an ethnographic site with reference to the political and democratic event that it is supposed to facilitate. Concerns about the socio-material bounding of the booth form the main empirical case – a debate, which recently occurred in Denmark when the government proposed to digitalise voting. Digitalisation here became a controversy because of the potential illicit influences that computer experts argued would enter the polling booth and challenge the secrecy and the privacy of the vote, the transparency of the electoral process, and thus the electoral enactment of democracy itself. In this way the polling booth potentially works as an ethnographic entry point for following shifts in contemporary debates.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• digitalisation
• elections
• place
• event
• democracy

Acknowledgements

This paper was originally presented at the panel Small Places, Large Issues: Thinking Through Anthropological Conundrums at the EASA conference in Tallinn in 2014. The paper could not have been written without the rest of the DemTech team. We are grateful for the comments that we received from Jon Mitchell, the panel organisers and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For example, John Stuart Mill. The introduction of the secret ballot in the UK was part of a set of democratic reforms conferring the right to vote to new groups (O’Gorman 2007). Alexis de Tocqueville (2000) also had interesting views regarding the secret ballot – for instance that it was needed in the stratified societies of the old world, but not in the egalitarian USA.

2. One could argue that it is difficult to know what is typical or atypical – it has to be demonstrated in relation to other connected events or situations. While certainly breaking the ground for later theoretical developments, many of the Mancunians, by being too caught up in relating their ethnographic findings to some notion of ‘social structure’, still had difficulties breaking away from structural functionalism (cf. Kapferer 2010).

3. In Denmark, the parliamentary elections are held at a minimum every four years, but there are also municipal elections every four years and elections for the European Parliament every five years.

4. This and other quotes from the debate are translated from Danish by the authors.

5. Somewhat surprising to us, e-voting has not been problematised in mainstream electoral studies (see, for instance, journals like Electoral Studies or Journal of Democracy), but in the field of computer science there are conferences and journals devoted solely to this topic (e.g. EVOTE, VoteID and The USENIX Journal of Election Technology and Systems). We have only found one scholar touching upon this in anthropology (Kelty 2008, 2009).

6. The research group in question aim at using ‘BitBallot’ – a system built on the same principles as BitTorrent or Bitcoin, where the system and thus also the security is distributed among participants via the blockchain encryption protocol and not reliant upon a third (neutral and honest) party for guarantee. Trust is thus reliant on continuous expanding computation (with systematic randomness) rather than human actors.

7. See www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/kmd/prosjekter/e-vote-trial/about-the-e-vote-project.html?id = 597724. The unofficial argument made by the public servant responsible for the security of the Internet election, however, was that e-voting should not stand alone but only work as a supplement to the analogue casting of ballots (Christian Bull, Kommunal- og Regionaldepartementet, Norway, personal communication).

8. Upon the conclusion of the second Norwegian election that allowed Internet balloting (September 2013), the organiser Christian Bull publicly destroyed the memory sticks with the encrypted keys in a blender to make sure that nothing could be retrieved (see the online video: www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/kmd/lyd_bilde/nett-tv/decryption-and-counting-ceremony-of-the-.html?id=735138).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Danish Council for Strategic Research under Grant 10-092309 (Strategiske Forskningsråd).