Why the online vote at the CDU party congress is a problem
No time right now?
The CDU has come up with a procedure with which it can elect its board of directors online, although this is actually not allowed. In times of the pandemic this is understandable, but the procedure is still questionable.
The CDU’s federal party congress begins today, at which the party wants to elect its new board, among other things. Due to the Sars-CoV2 pandemic, this party congress will take place online for the first time, similar to the Green Party conference a few months earlier.
However, the CDU is faced with a dilemma: The party law actually requires that a party congress is an assembly. Thanks to some changes in the law, online party conferences including digital voting are permitted, but online election of the board of directors is still not possible. The CDU makes do with a legal trick: The first ballot with three candidates is first carried out online, as well as the subsequent runoff between the two best placed. In this way, a winner is already certain during the party congress. This will then be confirmed again by postal vote.
From a legal point of view, this postal vote is a “vote by acclamation” and meets the requirements of party law. In practical terms, however, the CDU will have chosen its new chairman with a voting computer – and that is a problem.
The use of Voting computers in state elections banned the Federal Constitutional Court in 2009. Their use violates the principles of democratic elections, which include voting secrecy and traceability. In the traditional voting process with ballot paper, ballot box and counting, interested parties can easily watch and convince themselves that everything is going well, while at the same time it remains a secret who voted and how. This is not possible with a computer.
Voting computer: an unsolved problem
This is a problem that has fascinated computer scientists for decades. Numerous proposals have been made for its solution. Complex systems with checksums that can be compared afterwards may represent mathematically formal proof that the choice was not tampered with; but this is also not easily comprehensible for laypeople. Other systems rely on the blockchain, which does not solve any of the voting computer problems, but does well in the marketing prospectus.
And other systems, such as the online voting system in Estonia, forego voting secrecy without further ado, in that the machine saves who voted and how for later checking. In the end, the dilemma remains: a computer election is either secret, but then it is not traceable. Or it is understandable, but then no longer secret.
In Germany, however, the problem only plays a role in state elections. Associations and groups of all kinds can decide for themselves how they want to vote and vote – with the exception of parties that, according to party law, have to hold their board elections in the traditional way.
However, this only happens formally at the CDU party congress. There will be de facto online voting this weekend. So it is conceivable that in the first ballot a candidate is prevented by manipulation, the delegates grudgingly decide in favor of another candidate in the second ballot and then unsuspectingly confirm the result by postal vote. This scenario makes it clear that this procedure can at best represent an emergency solution.
Emergency solution in times of the pandemic
The CDU has good reasons for such an emergency solution. When the SPD unnecessarily used an online voting in the ballot on the party chairmanship in 2019 in parallel to the postal vote in order to make the election more convenient and more modern, there was still no virus pandemic in the country. However, the CDU is quite friendly towards voting computers: The Gahrens + Battermann voting system had it already used in 2019 at their classic presence party conventionwhere the delegates could vote via iPad.
In an interview with t3n, IT security consultant Linus Neumann from the Chaos Computer Club considers manipulation of the board election to be unlikely. He worries, however, that voting computers will be normalized: “The most likely result is that it works without any problems and you then feel confirmed to introduce something like this at a relevant level.”
The use of voting computers and voting systems is definitely a danger to democracy. If the election result is difficult or impossible to understand, the possibility increases for populists and conspiracy myths to claim election fraud. Allegedly manipulated voting computers also played a role in Donald Trump’s attempts to challenge the result of the US election. In Germany, the AfD is already trying to imitate him, but for lack of voting computers, it shoots itself into postal voting. Even if everything goes smoothly this time, the fact that a candidate claims afterwards that an internal party election has been manipulated can plunge a party into a crisis in the future.
