This past week saw history being made in South Africa as Doctors belonging to the South African Medical Association (SAMA) cast their electronic vote to determine satisfaction on the current OSD offer. This was the first known occurrence of the labour force in South Africa using electronic polling to express opinion. 

Ground breaking indeed, but the reality is that the percentage of doctors polled leads to rather misleading figures. According to the results released from the poll, 2484 of the roughly 7000 doctors in the public sector voted. Question is could have the 4500 that didn’t vote alter the so called mass opinion determined from the polling? The latter part of that question isn’t a Nerd Boys consideration however we are concerned with why more than half of SAMA’s members didn’t vote.

Could it be a case that they weren’t informed of the vote? Although this point might carry some weight, it cannot be justified as all intentions of the electronic voting process would have been clearly indicated on the SAMA website, and so in my opinion lack of information and all subsequent excuses based around this theme would be a direct result of technophobia or even techno-ignorance. Clearly then the computer literacy program thats in place needs to be extended to all sectors of South Africa even to established individuals.

Its no doubt that’s the electronic opinion factory is just beginning, be it in a poll, a status update or tweet. Now considering the various manners in which opinions can be expressed, I am forced to raise another question. Was the manner in which the results determined secure, could this have been hacked in any way?  The probability of this statement being true is rather minimum but is a consideration that must be taken. Recently we learnt of various twitter accounts being hacked and previous to this a story emerged of a famous political figure having their email account hacked. I say this again the chances of the SAMA poll being hacked are close to nil but for the purpose of this article and future meaningful electronic voting this thought must be raised.
 
The simple truth about this weeks events is that South Africa as yet again taken a step forward and will continue to do in months to come but as the importance of all things online grows so does the associated treat.

Tags: online vote, SAMA