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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?
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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
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
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
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~.
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
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."
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.