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1st Real Internet-Option Election in North America
gpmap writes "From the London Free Press: As voters across Ontario were preparing to head to the polls today to elect their municipal leaders, a technological first was quietly taking place in the easternmost reaches of the province. About 100,000 voters the counties of Prescott-Russell and Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry were registered to cast their ballots online. Under a new system developed by CanVote Inc., an eastern Ontario startup company, registered voters in 11 area municipalities had the option of voting via the Internet or telephone. "I believe we're the first to do a real full Internet election in North America," said Joe Church, president of CanVote Inc. "People vote by Internet or telephone at their choice. There is no conventional ballot at all." Voters were issued a PIN number with conventional registration cards mailed to area households. Since Nov. 5, people have been logging on to a CanVote website to vote. Church said the new system makes democracy more accessible by removing such barriers to voting as limited mobility or even poor weather." Of course, systems like ProxyVote have been around for a while, but those are commercial issues, rather then state issues.
Isn't too easy to buy votes here?
People could just sell their PIN numbers and large banks of people sit at phones all day voting by using these bought PINs.
I wish they'd set this up where I live. I'd like to fulfill my democratic responsibility, but there's so much good TV...
While I am fully supportive of technology, the one thing that I think might be a problem is how do you keep undue influence away from the voters? We already have a huge problem that isn't addressed in people shuttling old people to the voting poles, telling them who to exactly vote for. Now you can send them directly to their homes and say even "help" them make their selection. It will be ripe for fraud. What used to be a totally private matter can now be exploited by those who want to "stuff" the ballot box.
I am not sure there is a perfect way, but at least voting in person in a private booth makes that person harder to influence. Heck, you could come up with automated "bots" that all you need to do is type in your PIN and "we promise to vote for all the right people to you." Heck, the social engineering issues are ripe for exploitation.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you need to!
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
Church said the new system makes democracy more accessible by removing such barriers to voting as limited mobility or even poor weather.
I'll give him that. The one barrier it doesn't remove, however, is the economic one that provides Internet access to some but far from all. Millions of poor households receive monthly telecom discounts on just their phone lines--how/why could they shell out for even dialup service? Low-income citizens still constitute an enormous chunk of the non-voting population, which is big enough in itself.
The coolest voice ever.
In the last provincial election, for example, only about 55 per cent of the Ontario voters turned out to the polls.
The article really plays up out bad voter turnout is... however, US voter turnout is also right around 50%.
I hate when an article stresses facts that are the normal to push for some radical changes. I agree that non-traditional voting will be a welcomed change. However, don't suggest that Ontario needs it because their turnout is so horrible.
Davak
Voters, please remember to delete your browser's cookie file before voting again.
No body: "PIN Number" is redundant. "PIN", please.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
An even bigger concern I see with it is auditability. There's no paper trail, how can you verify that your vote was counted correctly? If someone cracks their database and changes the results, how would you even know? How could you possibly have any confidence in a poll without a paper trail?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
...and I'll tell you, if this works anything like some of the municipal services, they're fscked! Prescott-Russell is a backwater. Half the places there are still on dialup, for starters. The road and water systems are a shambles. My ex is going to have to shell out an extra $2K this year to help upgrade everything. Never a cop in sight, so the kids in their damn rice-boy POS cars run rampant on the residential streets. Meanwhile, the little guy in his white pickup who enforces municipal bylaws seems everywhere, looking for those hapless individuals who run their lawn sprinklers on the wrong day, or have a hedge 6 inches too high. Shows where the priorities are. I think this election is going to be a farce!
Whoever has access to the records:
pin xxx -> voted for yyy and pin xxx -> is person zzz, could apply the transitive property: person zzz -> voted for yyy.
At least with low technology (cross on paper), your vote is mixed with several others.
One subtle problem with online voting is that it's much easier for a third-party to coerce your vote and to check that you voted "correctly". The third-party (an employer, union official, local mob boss, etc) can "encourage" you to make sure you vote at an online facility where they are watching... and there goes the privacy of the polling place and the anonymity of the ballot box.
Of course, in earlier times this was recognized as an issue with absentee voting. The solution that traditional voting systems adopted was to allow the voter to vote in person later at a real polling place, and that vote, (presumably more free of coercion), would invalidate their earlier vote.
I wonder if CanVote provided a similar "vote override" option for Ontario citizens? A polling place vote should always override an alternative-mechanism vote. I hope in the move to online voting we don't lose the non-obvious protections that have been added to our current electoral system over time.
--LP, a programmer who also supports voter-verified paper trails
-MDL
Happy meals fund terrorism
People seem to find touch-pad voting machines suspect because they don't leave a paper trail, and it's too easy to hack, etc. Well, wouldn't internet voting be even worse as it A. Doesn't leave a paper trail,and B. Probably the most easily hacked voting method. Plus, this possibly allows the uninformed, lazy voter, deciding who they want for office. We could easily end up with a total uneducated scum bag in office just because Al Bundy internet voted for him.
This is bound to increase voter "turnout" which could be a good thing, but
i) how seriously will people take such a vote? Maybe a little vetting via bad weather and a walk to the local school is not such a bad thing, and
ii) how will this new, higher-percentage of the voting public reflect the public at large? Yes, there are terminals available at many public librairies, but it doesn't take a sociologist to realize that there's still going to be a class bias perpetuated if having a computer means easy access to the vote.
A higher percentage of voters is no good if only the needs of some groups in society are being reflected.
Just my $.02
I could just see someone wardialing an election.
There seem to be other problems as well. If you can vote at home you can record the process as proof you voted a particular way. This would allow you to sell your vote.
What kind of internet setup are they using ? I hope its not Windows and IIS running ASP.
Then there is the whole papertrail issue on the back end.
They really don't seem to have addressed the issues of why there are polling places instead of return mail for voting.
In this country there are three ways to cast a vote, besides walking to the polling station:
- Get a lift from a volunteer
- Arrange a postal vote in advance
- Arrange a proxy vote in advance
The ballot papers are counted by hand, with candidates and guests in attendance. This system works. Now, you may say it is a minor inconvenience to actually have to get off your behind and cast your vote once every five years, and maybe to have to help counting up the papers or driving assorted strangers back and forth to the polling station all day. But your employer is not allowed to take any disciplinary action against you if you have to vote on works time, and when you realise that the alternative could be a fascist dictator forcing his way into power by hijacking an election, it really doesn't seem so much of an inconvenience after all. Maybe it would be appropriate to punish people who fail to vote? People have fought and died for democracy, and yet this is what we do in their memory. Of course, [GODWIN'S LAW EXEMPTION REQUEST] it doesn't help that there are politicians out there who have ideas that Adolf Hitler could only have had wet dreams aboutJe fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I would prefer the moderation "correct". Or perhaps "correct, and heavily pissed off by seeing gajillions of intelligent people make the same stupid mistake." "PIN number". "ATM machine". "CD-ROM disc". "DAT tape". All wrong. All stupid.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Someone who is not motivated enough to take an hour or so to travel to their local voting booth and vote does not care or know enough about the issues involved to make an informed and sensible choice.
Having 90% of the population vote when only 40% of the population researches, interrogates and cares only means you'll have 50% of pseudo random "noise" votes drowning out the informed, important votes.
Why are people surprised by this? Politicans that are for this sort of thing think they can use it to their advantage, to (Shock! Horrors!) cheat the system. There have been elections in the US where out and out voter fraud have occurred, (notably, Wisconsin and Missouri, and of course, Chicago), and all this will do is make it harder to detect, and harder to enforce.
Wait until someone breaks into this system and turns an election on it's ear... You'll see some mighty fast backpedaling to the old system.
That's the way proxy votes come out in business, there is rarely any suspense about how it will come out because everyone knows before hand who has the blocks of proxy votes needed. Also, you would expect a new PIN for each election, but if you signed up for the right program, each of your PINs could be delivered straight to the party headquarters of your choice.
Many states with lotteries already do something like this. Sign up and have your same favorite numbers played every week and charged against your credit card. Voluntary taxation made easy.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is not suficiently advanced.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Private elections are another matter. In the same Canada, Mountain Co-op has been running these elections for a while. Whenever you buy some mountain gear (or anything for that matter) from them, you become a member of the co-op. As such, you have a say in how the system is run and you get to elect the board of directors. Election implementation is overseen by PWC or E&Y, and you get a package in the mail containg the election information.
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
They've done voting by mail for many many years where my mother lives. (Rural area in Ontario). Again, no conventional ballot.
Granted, the entire field of candidates for this election is 6 people, running for 3 positions, the rest were acclaimed.
I don't think making it easy for the masses to vote will necessarily improve government - "Left to themselves, the people will always vote for Cake and Circuses" (Churchill?)
I kind of liked Heinliens idea that in order to have a vote you should have to have contributed in the first place to that society. That it wasn't enough just to have money, or have a pulse and the luck of being born there....
Too bad they forgot to mention the Town of Markham, billed as Canada's Technology Capital (just north of Toronto). Apparently 11,700 residents registered to vote online this year in this municipal election. (note: it's not a terribly small down - with a population of 190,000)
I was sent the information on how to vote online, but I just don't trust it, what with no paper trail. The elections are today, and I plan on going and filling in my old-fashioned "x in the circle" paper ballot.
'Course the mayor (Don Cousens) is a shoe-in. He's been mayor since forever and there are no viable alternative candidates. Don doesn't seem to be even bothering advertising his platform much - all I've seen is about one or two election signs around town. All the action is between the city council or the regional council positions.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
If you were black and lived in Florida this might just allow you to vote instead of being turned away from the voting booths.
Of course there might be other ways of eliminating votes from inappropriate people - "His name is Leroy, just drop the vote into the bit bucket~.
This is a classic by Heinlein. I recommend it highly.
The plot deals with precisely the fact that voters were becoming apathetic and turnout was dropping. Unlike your scenario the people that cared were all fundamentalist christians who elected their prophet to power.
There are plenty of issues with e-voting (privacy, security, etc..).
But there is at least one thing it could do better than - at least cheaper than - paper voting. I'm thinking of schemes like Condorcet voting, which would eliminate first past the post absurdities. People routinely get a seat with only 40% of expressed vote (55% turnout...), with the remaining 60% of votes being split by the other two parties. Oh, and the Marijuana party, Rhino party knock-offs, Marxist-Leninist...
E-voting for the same old system is not quite as interesting. Perhaps if people thought we could make votes more meaningful, more than 55% of us would bother to vote.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Church said the new system makes democracy more accessible by removing such barriers to voting as limited mobility or even poor weather
This may work in the US, but in another countries this doesn't seems fair. In my country (Argentina) postal services sucks, so probabily you won't get the card/pin by standard mail. There are a lot of people with outdated address on the gov' databases. So even if the cards are mailed, they will arrive to a different place. And the election day here is marked as a red calendar day so you don't have to go to work that day, so you don't have excuse to not to go to vote. The only problem, is that you must stand in a line for up to one hour. Another problem is that you could get force to be a election official (even if you don't want). Ok, going back to the antidemocratic issue, the main problem I see here is that there is people that doesn't want to learn new things and won't adopt a new system (most older people is like this) and won't vote at all. So I doubt it will make democracy more accessible
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
News just in: "Geek complains about other geeks' geekiness on uber-geek website!!!".
Morbo: "Exit poll show evil underdog Richard Nixon trailing with estimated zero votes."
Human female: "The time is 7:59 and the robot polls are now opening." (short pause) "And robot votes are now in. Nixon has won."
Morbo: "Morbo congratulates our gargantuan cyborg president. May death come quickly to his enemies."
"Warning: Please be patient and wait for the next screen to show: it takes the server time for to process your vote. If you click on the Reload button on your browser, you will end up recording multiple votes".
It is none of your business if I use my own person PIN number at the automatic teller ATM machine.
Why are you butting in? Do you work for the FBI bureau? I've seen stories about you guys on the CNN news network.
Shoot the monkey banners and pop-up ad's from candidates on the voters form......
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
OK, it's official. Democracy is officially worthless.
Sorry, I know how the internet works, and that's more than enough to convince me that nothing as important as voting should be done through it.
It's been a long time.
You stupid fuck. I am from London. Let me explain why its called London.
English explorers settled in this area. They started looking around, and found a river. They thought it looked like the "thames" river back home, so they named it the thames river. Then a town formed on the forks of the thames. So they named this town London.
So you want original city names? How about "York" as Toronto was called, which isnt original. But the US "New York" is a knockoff of York, which is also English.
North America is filled with cities, rivers, mountains, and any other thing that is named which have been named after primarily European names
So shut the fuck up, and leave London alone.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
The truth never stopped them before.. don't expect it to now.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
The voting process here is one sad joke, anyway. If you're not on the voter's list, all you have to do to vote is show up at the polls with a piece of ID that shows your address. They don't even ask for proof of citizenship. The enumeration process (whereby you get on the voter's list) itself is pathetic. I received a voter's card for the provincial election (in early October), but not for the municipal election -- this is in Toronto. One person who did receive a voter's card for the municipal election, though, was my grandfather, who has been dead for over a year and who had been mentally incapacitated for years before. There've also been stories of 13 year old children and even pets being enumerated and receiving voter's cards. And if you do get a voter's card, you're absolutely golden. They let you in and let you vote without even making you show your ID to prove that you are who you say you are.
This is a good idea. Let's use it in the united states! Wait a minute... You say that any script kiddie can break into the databases they're using? No problem, it's safe, it's based off the secure Windows Server 2003...
Wow, r00lz0rh4xxxx0r was just elected president with eleventy million votes! Wait a minute, the state of "133tness" just submitted it's votes, that's infinity billion votes for someone trying to be funny. Goddamn script kiddies!
So, this is a really good idea, and we should implement it... CmdrTaco for President!
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
If you're going to beta test some goofy online voting system, might as well do it in a place that doesn't count, like Washington, D.C. or Ontario. I mean, isn't Tom Green from Ontario? 'Nuff said.
Anyone know if they are running Apache or IIS or someting else?
Imagine phoning in your vote in the recent CA recall election.... To vote for Andrews, George press '1#' To vote for Brown, Jane press '2#' ...
To vote for Zorowski, Ronald press '134#'
To repeat the list of candidates again press '*'
The only problem with this is the same one as making voting mandatory - all those uninformed people who don't really care anyway are required to make a decision. The people who are informed and therefore make decisions based on this rather than media saturation ("Bush? Oh yeah - I've heard of him, don't know who the other guys are...") get swamped.
It's a little different to having a easy one-click democracy but it works (or doesn't) on the same principle.
None of which comes close to the potential abuses of vote-buying and auditability however.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
35,765 Internet Votes Cast by Arizona Democrats was submitted on 11 March 2000.
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
markham, ontario also had an internet vote - athough their system was from a US company , Election Systems and Software. So that means all our votes are going to a nanmeless server in wisconson!
I certainly hope they didn't do anything dumb like making the PIN numbers 4-6 digit consecutive numbers.
I'm going to vote twice. Once using my own PIN, and once using President Scroob's PIN of 1-2-3-4-5.
The pin number is okay, but what if the mail is intercepted? What I would prefer to see is a link to the Canadian Federal government's digital certificate setup that was talked about in a previous slashdot article Or better yet, a combination of the digital certificate and the PIN number, to help protect confidentiality of the votes.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
For those of you interesting in touch-screen voting, there was a very interesting show about it on the weekly PRI (public radio) program This American Life, which discussed the problems with the system, including the Diebold system and the non-auditability of the new touch-screen voting machines. The audio isn't up on their website for free yet, but it should be here soon. For those who can't wait, you can get audio from the show at audible.com.
If you don't yes listen to This American Life yet, you should start. It's probably the best weekly show in any medium -- radio or television.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Well, I do live in Toronto, and... what the fuck are you *on* about?
Your post is totally nonsensical. The streets are not 'a shambles'. We have one of the best Police forces in the world, and one of the lowest crime rates of any major city. I've never seen a rice burner in my neighbourhood, I don't know what 'little guy in a white pickup' you are referring to, and ....NOW you are equating local by-laws to their Internet election experiment?
I take it back. You must be from Canada, because you must be very very high. I think your post is a farce. And I cannot believe it got modded up by anyone. It doesn't SAY anything!
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
We actually did have a city named Berlin. It was called Kitchner, and was founded by German immigrants long before WWI or WWII. When WWII rolled around, the city was renamed from Berlin to Kitchner due to the whole Nazi bit.
Paris is an existing town, you can find it on a map about 70km east of London. In both cases founded by immigrants.
Om, nomnomnom...
Click here if you also want an extra vote when implemented in the United States. I hear the Philippino's are the best way to accomplish this task.
If you're too damn lazy to take the effort to go to the polling place, maybe you don't deserve a vote!
Oh, wait, I'm California. Oops. Hope the Canadians don't mind living with my decisions!
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
By "authentication" I mean the security sense: verifying that you are who you claim to be.
This is not the only issue with online voting (the slashhorde has already pointed out that there is a privacy concern), but it is, in my opinion, the most important one. They mail you the PIN number. This means your vote is only as secure as the postal service. How secure is that? Not very damn secure at all.
Never mind that someone else could pilfer your mail and therefore your constitutional rights, someone in your own household could do it. Imagine your 10-year-old son deciding to get back at you by voting Republican (or whatever the Canadian equivalent is).
Absentee ballots also have this issue, but at least those have a physical signature. Until we all have smart cards with biometrics to use for identification, any such system will have a major authentication problem.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
This country runs on apathy. High turnout may sound all warm and fuzzy, but what is more important than turnout is smart, researched, and educated voting.
People that are too damn lazy to even go to polls or vote by mail are not the type of people that you want voting in the first place.
Witold
www.witold.org
witold.org
Welcome back, Big Guy! America has missed you!
From the proxy vote page:
If you received notification by E-Mail:
1. To access an electronic ballot, enter the 12 or 14 digit Control Number contained in your E-Mail message and the PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION NUMBER (PIN) you used when you enrolled for electronic delivery.
and further down:
Check this box if you have forgotten your PIN and wish to have it emailed to the address on record.
Is that such a good idea? Passing both control numbers and PINs over cleartext email?
On a separate note, I'm from Winchester (less than 2000 people) in Dundas County, and recently found out that they have both DSL and Cable for Internet access there.
US voter turnout is also right around 50%.
...
Well, I have my doubts about the accuracy of this claim.
In a recent election hereabouts, some time after the election, there was a news report that 30,000 uncounted votes had been discovered in one precinct. They counted them, of course, and claimed that this didn't effect the election results.
In the 2000 election, there was a similar report from Florida, but the "misplaced" boxes of votes contained around 100,000 ballots. After they were counted, there was a similar claim that it hadn't changed the outcome of the election. Right.
My reaction to all the stories like this is to wonder how many other votes were similarly "misplaced" and not "discovered". And how do I know that my vote wasn't similarly "misplaced". (I live in a university neighborhood that often votes differently from the city as a whole, so there is good reason to be suspicious.)
I've long wondered if, when we hear that only 50% of the voters actually voted, what really happened was that 90% voted, but the votes of 40% were "misplaced" and not counted.
With proprietary electronic voting systems, not auditable by the public, it seems that the voting turnout is highly likely to decrease similarly
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Are you saying that using a LCD display with a VGA graphics adapter card is the wrong way to read slashdot articles? Perhaps the media (eg. the BBC corporation) should run a series on helping people use their TLA's properly.
You're saying that this system will work as intended, allowing people to express their actual views more easily? If it works that way, then more power to them.
The cynical view is, this will allow people to give their PINs to the local strongman in exchange for fat loot.
From the article:
...or maybe I've just fed a troll...
"About 100,000 voters the counties of Prescott-Russell and Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry were registered to cast their ballots online."
The article specifically mentions Prescott-Russell, in eastern Ontario, just east of the city of Ottawa. Where the hell did you get Toronto out of that?
Unless these municipalities have decided to set up internet kiosks everywhere, doesn't this raise the question about accessibility and who this REALLY makes it easier for. This will essentially make it easier for the more wealthy to decide the government, since now they don't even have to leave their houses to vote, whereas the lower income constituents still have to go somewhere else to vote.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." --George Orwell
I was interested to see they had a hybrid system. You marked your vote on paper but then its run thru a scanner which presumably counts the votes. So the second the polls close they'll know the results. But the old style ballots are around for recounts.
They scanned thru one lady's ballot and the machine gave an error. The election official looked at the ballot with her and told her had mistakenly voted for two people for mayor - duh. She was talken over to a table and I assume her first ballot would be destroyed and she was given a second one. Normally ballots like that from people who are too stupid to know how to vote would not count. That seems like a bad side-effect of this device. I am not sure what I think about the official looking at her secret ballot.
A display on the machine show the number of voters. At 11:30 it was only 101 people (including me but not include that woman). Doesn't seem like very many for a very dense urban riding. I guess my vote might count.
Does this have anything to do with the dilbert episode on last night?
There's little point trying to prescribe correct language -- it only serves to annoy others and worsen your own blood pressure. And most of the time there turns out to be a reason people use language the way they do.
In this case, there are a relatively small number of possible TLAs so collisions are common. Using the TLA as an adjective -- which requires a noun for it to modify -- has become a common way of providing context for the TLA. For many people, the small amount of redundancy seems to be worth the convenience of not having to spell out the full phrase.
In the current system, the voter can always lie to a candidate, and within the privacy of the voting room, do what he/she wishes.
If anyone ever approached me to buy my vote, I'd gladly accept their money. Then, I would go into the voting booth and vote against them. If a person is buying votes, do I really want to vote for them? I think not.
Check out Black Box Voting to find out what is and is not good practice in the world of voting and voting technology (read some of the free online edition of the book by Bev Harris, it's quite interesting). I think online voting falls sqarely in the not good category. It is simply not auditable and is susceptible to too great a number of security risks.
Why not go around town and threaten people "your vote or your life" just like in the good old days before secret ballot.
"Your PIN or your life" would work too.
So do I: I find out whom they've endorsed and then make sure I vote for the opposing candidate. :)
A PIN number would be a Personal ID Number Number.
"PIN number". "ATM machine". "CD-ROM disc". "DAT tape". All wrong. All stupid.
GNU must be infinitely bad...
Ive just returned from voting. We are using a Diebold AccuVote system. You are required to mark a sheet which is then fed by the 'operator' (in your presence) into a scanner. If you have spoiled ballot, the machine returns your ballot giving you an opportunity to correct it.
I asked the operator, "are these counted by hand confirm the results?", he said "no, only if a returning officer or scrutineer requests it" -- didnt leave me with the warm fuzzy feeling.
The good news is that at least there is a paper trail - the ballots COULD be recounted if necessary. This is much better than the touchscreen type that leaves no possible way of recounting.
All in all, id say I dont mind the system. But a recount of the paper ballots should be an automatic, release the 'machine tallied preliminary results' then have a manual paper count... this removes the "this election is electronically rigged" doubt.
Online elections have been tried before in Canada -- the last one I heard about was for the election of the New Democratic Party held over a year ago, run by election.com.
During this election the system was hacked and was down for a few hours, highlighting the fact that anarchists and hackers see elections as a focal point to concentrate their efforts; luckily for election.com, the NDP, and pro-online vote advocates, they had a backup plan of some sort that seemed to thwart further hack attempts (I don't know what they did though).
Online elections will not lead to massive fraud, no more than has happened with paper ballots in most countries already. The software set up by some of the online election companies is robust and undoubtedly have redundancies built in that can thwart potential hacks. Of course nothing if foolproof but there is no sense throwing up one's hands before trying.
Maybe someone can explain to me why an online election would be any different to, say, online banking systems, for example? An online bank has a lot at stake as well, and is open to hack attempts 247, not just for 12 hours in 4 years.
It also probably WILL mean a larger voter turnout, as people with internet access (quite a large percentage of registered voters, in Canada anyways) will find it easier to vote, as they have when filing their taxes online (another government system that hasn't been seriously hacked in the few years it has been active).
Get used to on-line elections -- their "paper" trails are as good as we have already, and they attest to how robust software can be made to fend off serious and concentrated hack attempts.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. The election in the next town over is using Diebold vote counting machines. Lesser of two evils I guess...