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.

Comments

Paying

[Davak]

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.

Re:Paying

[mirko]

Isn't it even easier and cheaper to buy the voting system ?
Which guarantee do the voters have that their voice and only their voices will be counted expectedly ?

BTW, why don't they just move their asses to the voting booth ?
Voting is not a formality, it is supposed to be a conscious act.
For example, you have to seriously consider a candidate's program before voting, it's not like a Slashdot poll (unless cowboy neal does politics) : who does remember which slashdot poll option he choosed 3 months ago ?

Good idea but...

[Kr3m3Puff]

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!

One remaining barrier...

[Faust7]

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.

No body: "PIN Number" is redundant. "PIN", please.

[JessLeah]

No body: "PIN Number" is redundant. "PIN", please.

Audits?

[Arker]

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?

Re:Audits?

[AKnightCowboy]

Say I vote for X, and someone has compromised the system that wants Y to win. So my vote is registered for Y, both in the database and in the printout. How do I, the voter at home, know this has happened?

How do you know the volunteers at the local elementary school don't take the ballot box full of punch cards out back and toss them into the incinerator? You don't.

Re:Audits?

[mcc]

You can register to be an election monitor. If you do this you get to sit there and watch the entire process. If they throw stuff in the trash, you see it.

You could register to sit there by the e-vote server and watch the audit printout scroll by you, if you wanted. But you could not physically look inside the computer and see if someone between that piece of paper and the voter is somehow tampering with the incoming bits. You can't look at the hard drive and know that the election executable is the same executable that was certified. You can run a checksummer on the executable, perhaps, but how do you trust the checksummer?

There are perhaps situations under which electronic voting could be a good thing. But it is fundamentally incompatible with the sort of openness that is vital to a healthy election system.

Re:Improve Voter Turnout?

[zerblat]

Sure, but compare that to the turnout numbers for other countries. Having only half of the elegible voters voting is a huge democratic problem. If you can't even get a majority of the population to bother to vote, something must be wrong and radical changes are needed.

Of course, voting from your home seems like an extremely bad idea and an even bigger democratic problem than low turnout. There's no way to ensure that the voter actually voted independently if they voted from home -- it makes it possible to threaten/pay people to vote for your candidate and make sure they actually voted that way.

other problems

[dandelion_wine]

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 still state my position

[ajs318]

that the fundamental basis of democracy is too important to be entrusted to any process not open to scrutiny at every stage.

In this country there are three ways to cast a vote, besides walking to the polling station:

1. Get a lift from a volunteer
2. Arrange a postal vote in advance
3. 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 about .....

What are people surprised by this?

[deanj]

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.