In various electoral and political reform projects, the implementation of electronic voting in Colombia has been proposed to the Congress of the Republic, as it is considered to provide greater accessibility to the electorate, facilitate direct democracy, increase turnout, and speed up the counting of votes. sound and know the result. It seeks to take advantage of major advances in technology and extend them to democracy, as its applications have been successful in economics, statistics, education, and even medicine.

For this, the people’s vote will be carried out via computers owned by residents at home. Voter ballots or cards, ballot boxes for depositing votes, polling stations, judges and tellers will disappear. Voters will exercise their right to vote from their computer, by clicking the mouse on the appropriate icon and then the electronic device will deliver the result at the end of the appropriate time to vote.

Despite these enormous advantages and benefits, technology implies risk, insecurity and uncertainty, because the network is exposed to very serious dangers, namely being blocked. Moreover, in the operation of digital tools it is observed that the hacker’s actions enable unauthorized entry into the operating system which enables forms of fraud, impersonation, data theft via the Internet, robbery of banks and financial entities online; Similarly, it should be noted that computing is not free from electronic viruses which infect computers and prevent them from operating, changing their programs, erasing their memory, and disabling hardware, to which it must be added that there is no definitive cure for such viruses. appear periodically. . Electronic fraud in elections via voting machines and software manipulation is also possible.

A serious study of this proposal needs to look at the world panorama of this type of voting and see the results in countries that have experienced it. Currently, only 9 countries have electronic voting: Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, United States, United Arab Emirates, Estonia, Philippines, India and Venezuela; its application is being studied in 19 countries, including Colombia, Argentina, France, Italy, and Russia. Once implanted, its use was banned or suspended in Germany, Finland, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Norway, the Netherlands and the UK, a total of 7.

These 7 countries have used electronic voting in elections and are currently banning it for various reasons such as insufficient security and guarantees, raising suspicions of fraud, vulnerable software and enabling cyber attacks, lack of verification, reliability and not guaranteeing election secrecy, no contributing to increased citizen participation, as initially believed, offers the potential for elections to be hacked, does not allow oversight of the process and does not guarantee secret voting and democratic control of the count. Since voting security is not guaranteed, these countries are forced, after experience, to reject the use of electronic voting.

In short, out of 183 Member States of the United Nations, 9 use it, in 7 days it is prohibited or legally disabled, that is, they no longer apply it, and 17 are studying the feasibility and convenience of its use, the data shows that Electronic voting has not yet had penetration or greater acceptance in different countries or in their democracies.