I Comment From Panda On The Evm
Correspondent | Monday January 30, 2017 13:59
Your online banking and your business systems are all vulnerable to the same. As such, we cannot deny that the EVM is not 100% secure, as long as any data will be transmitted electronically the risk cannot be eliminated totally.
However we must also agree that as the risk is inherent, there are similar risk management interventions to put in place to reduce the risk and improve the integrity of the system. Unless we doubt the integrity of our civil servants and IEC officers, we should accept that they will not be easily willing to manipulate the results of the elections which they are charged to administer.
It is also hard to establish with 100% certainty that those officers are pro-BDP, attempting to use them in any unethical dealing will hurt the BDP and the BDP even if it wanted, will be deterred to make such attempts of which their reputations can only be estimate to be their total demise.
Progressively, in my view, we must not be strongly mobilising again the EVM. We must, especially all those who are able to read this, be for the efficient process to conduct our elections. We must, in our embracing of such a solution, be more engaged in improving the system and channelling our energies towards its integrity and success. Let us embrace the EVM.
Then to those who have embraced the EVM by virtue of being BDP, we must not silence the concerns of those who are skeptical, as we are all stakeholders. In fact as shareholders in as far as elections are concerned, we cannot suggest that the concerns of others are of no use. We may also in truth, at least for those who comment from Panda, never have a true understanding of how electronic systems of this magnitude work and cannot claim a monopoly of knowledge of a system we are intellectually deficient of its operations. The EVM has the potential, if not handled properly while there is time, to reverse all our democratic gains and upset the peace we have only known in this country as a birthright.
The EVM has the potential to make voting efficient and reducing voter apathy, especially among some citizens who have zero tolerance to stay in long queues and wait two days for results from a constituency with 30,000 “just to vote in a bunch of people who only need your vote and forget about you once they won. These people are all the same”, they would say.
Ishmael Metlha Mokwena via