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 ?

Mobility Issues

[Beardydog]

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...

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.

Re:One remaining barrier...

[swillden]

The one barrier it doesn't remove, however, is the economic one that provides Internet access to some but far from all.

The article says they can vote via phone. So you only have to make sure that everyone has access to a telephone, which seems reasonable.

However, there are still problems with this scheme: vote buying/coercion and lack of verifiability being the main ones.

Vote Early & Vote Often

[Anonymous Coward]

Voters, please remember to delete your browser's cookie file before voting again.

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?

[diersing]

I think Enron cured me of my need to validate things on paper.

The same way databases can be altered so can paper (here I come with a bucket full of ballots and whooops, into the trash they go where I've cleverly hid a similar bucket with the results I want to be counted). If you have all faith in paper ballots please research Louisiana election fraud, apparently in the mighty south, the dead rise to vote every year - the buggers.

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.

Is your vote kept secret?

[simonesteban]

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.

Issues with online voting...

[LinuxParanoid]

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

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 .....

Re:No body: "PIN Number" is redundant. "PIN", plea

[JessLeah]

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.

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.

not news

[scorilo]

The problem I have with internet/touchtone elections for public office is that no matter how well thought out the "plan" is, evil private interests will be able to hijack it. The same applies to any public initiative that conflicts at some level with one's ability to profit (except, perhaps, in Scandinavia).

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.

That's nice

[JediTrainer]

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.

Would this be useful in Florida?

[Epeeist]

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~.

Oblig. Futurama Quote...

[Insightfill]

Human female: "The sheer drama of this election has driven voter turnout to its highest level in centuries, six percent."

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."

Enumeration is a joke in Ontario

[rruvin]

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.