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Canada Considering Online Voting In Elections
ehud42 writes "Slashdot readers generally agree that voting machines such as those from Diebold are a bad idea. Well, what about online voting? That is what the Vancouver Sun is reporting. Given that voter turnout in our most recent election was the worst on record, Elections Canada is kicking around the idea of allowing voters to register online, update registration information online, and maybe even vote online."
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I think this could work, as long as they make it very VERY secure and accurate.
On the other hand, If you're too lazy to get off your butt and vote, I wouldn't mind it if your voice wasn't heard in my country. The problem isn't that its too hard to vote, its that people need to realize how important it is that they vote.
DO NOT WANT
All your ballot are belong to us!
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
4chan would rig it and have 7 billion people write in pedobear. Then they would convince a member to have his name legally registered as such and get plastic surgery to become a bear. Child porn, warez, and weird porn would be not only legalized, but taught in school and subsidized. Sad part is I think my oh so humorous prediction would be fairly accurate.
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Not until it can be proven that person voting is the person they represent. Not until it can be proven that you aren't be coerced into voting a certain way.
I will never support this.
The kicker of all this electronic voting is that is easy. It really is, it's a damn simple problem to solve. Even online voting.
It's fucked up constantly by the processes we all abhor, and there should be a lesson in there for us. But electronic voting is actually a very simple problem to solve.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Voting must be anonymous and private. If you allow online voting, then nothing prevents someone from standing over your shoulder and paying you $50 to vote the way he wants. Yes, absentee ballots have the same problem, which is why I think Oregon's all-mail voting system is terribly dangerous. This vulnerability isn't theoretical: the scenario I describe actually happened throughout the 19th century and led to some very crooked elections. It's why we switched to a secret ballot in the 1880s. Let's not forget our history here.
What the summary doesn't tell you is that the "last election" came to be from the government at the time being dissolved by the Governor General.
It was not a regularly scheduled election (ie the current term was only approx half way through) and the general consensus was that it was a waste of tax-payers money and/or a political publicity stunt held by the opposing party.
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
For all this whining about Diebold, most people don't have a problem using Diebold's ATMs for banking. For something that is a lot closer to affecting you significantly and directly, Diebold seems to be a pretty decent solution. If their machines made as many irregular transactions as electronic voting opponents claim, the machines wouldn't be fit to handle everyday banking.
You'd have to ascribe malice to Diebold's motives to honestly claim that they were trying to throw an election towards a candidate. With their stellar reputation in the banking industry, I am not ready to make that claim. More likely, I would consider 70 year old untrained volunteers who don't understand technology much more prone to make mistakes in machine handling. The problem isn't the machines' inability to count votes. It's the nincompoops who don't have anything better to do than sit around for 10 hours on election day failing to take even the most basic precautions in vote handling.
It's so easy lots of people will be voting often ... all day long. In the mean time lots of other people won't have any idea how to get around the "You have already voted" pop-up they get on their first try.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
In any election that lets people vote from anywhere, votes can be coerced with a gun, and people can show their actual vote to whatever corrupt mafioso wants to force their vote. These things are not possible (or at least they're more difficult) if the only places to vote are properly run, properly secure polling places.
Allowing people to vote online isn't going to solve the turnout problem as long as we have a federal election every couple of years. Canada has had something like four federal elections in the last five years, which is pretty ridiculous. The voters are tired of it, and they're demonstrating that by not bothering to vote. I'm not saying this is the best way to demonstrate disgust, but the ability to vote online isn't going to fix the real problem.
marblecake also the game
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
Problem is the internet is worldwide medium. Accounts can be hacked or spoofed. Also the votes must be verified by hand. How are they gonna do that when it's all electronic with no paper trail?
It won't work. American public won't trust it and won't be for a very long time. Nothing is hacker-proof, I don't care how hard they tried to make it cracker-proof.. It won't happen.
Don't blame me, I voted for Cromartie!
while in general this seems like a poor idea, for many reasons that will be posted by others, by pushing
forward a good online voting system, many other benefits could arise, such as:
- longer voting periods than one day - like a week or even a month to lock in a vote
- verification that your real vote has been received and counted while voting is still possible,
possibly reducing some voter fraud types
- different voting methods than the simple, single vote, winner take all
- better support for various languages
- increased interest and participation by younger, more Internet savvy voters
- state developing and using strong cryptographic system for ensuring privacy and security of votes
- better, more frequent accounting of population
- increased social support for secure Internet systems and Internet access
- new open source, open standard systems for secure electronic voting
- Increased delivery and accountability of government services via the Internet
Only then should they be permitted to count votes. Until then, if the issue is worth all of us voting on it, it's worth a few of us spending part of our day counting the votes.
/~30 years computer scientist here. I know more ways to cheat an electronic election than you do most likely. I don't know any way to secure an electronic election.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
1) easier for the apathetic (and likely uninformed) to vote?
2) easier to hack an election?
No good reason. It's just a stupid idea all around.
Electronic candidates, on the other hand, might be an improvement.
The problem of low voter turnout has to do with the nature of Canadian politics. The facts, for our dear American cousins south of the border who don't know what's going on with their single biggest trading partner:
It's a multiparty parliamentary system. There are two dominant parties, the Conservatives and Liberals, a very siginficant local collection of politics call the Bloc (from Quebec, and includes hardcore separatist groups), and a significant minority party, the lefty NDP. There is also a significant Green party presence, although they lost their seat last election.
The party in power is the conservative party. Whether your sentiments are conservative or not, (mine are not, but that's not relevant right here) doesn't change the fact that the leader, Stephen Harper, is an imbecile who has ineptly squandered every opportunity to get it right. I don't much care for the Conservative Party, but I feel really bad for them having such a dumb ass for a leader. It's kind of embarrassing. You have my sincere condolences.
The party in power (Conservative) is a Minority government, i.e., it rules without a majority in parliament.
The second party, the Liberal Party had an obtuse francophone for a leader, who lead the party to a completely uninspiring defeat at last election. His name was Dion, and he was a smart man with all the personality of a can of paint and all the media saavy of an average middle school student.
Harper, in a typical bullheaded move, pulled some shenanigans right after the election, and pissed off all the other parties, including the Bloc. So they agreed to form a coalition, which would have put Harper out on the street, and Dion (the man he just defeated) in as Prime Minister. This was obviously a very bad idea as the Conservatives hated Dion, and the Liberals weren't exactly effusive with praise. In fact, they were anxious to ditch his sorry ass ASAP. Rather than face an ignominious defeat at the hands of Dion, Harper drove his Waaaaahmbulance over to the governor General's office and weeped bitter tears to the Queen's representative, because, Canada is (in a few narrow ways) still a fucking colony and the Queen is technically the head of state. He begged her to prorogate parliament, and she rolled on it.
This left Canada without a functioning government at one of the most critical times in world history: the collapse of American Capitalism in winter 2008/9.
So, if something truly insane happened, there would be no deliberative body to make policy and pass law. A truly desperate and stupid move by Harper, who was already on the shitlist of the conservatives for failing to get a majority gov't, and on the permanent shitlist of all the other parties for, well, basically being a bit of a dick.
In the process, the Liberals booted Dion and replaced him with a man named Ignatieff. Ignatieff is very smart, fairly slick, and every bit of a dick that Harper is, it's just that he has a few (if poorly implemented and largely hidden) scruples.
Who represents the NDP, the Greens and the Bloc is only of consequence to the constituents, as none will be a majority party any time soon.
So, now we're looking at another election, and it will likely be the third in 4 or so years. And my guess is it will have the same results as before. None.
The only thing that is likely to happen is the Liberals will take over with a minority government, and thusly be every bit as effective at governing this nation of cats as Harper, i.e, not at all.
So, this online voting boondoggle is jsut te latest drama in this soap opera of Canadian Politics.
tune in next week when they decide to ban beer, but only between 2 AM and 6 AM. Or something equally retarded.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
here you go:
http://homepage.mac.com/rcareaga/diebold/big_die/diebold_1.jpg
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Do not want.
Diebold concerns aside, online voting can be so severely tampered with that it's not even funny.
Concerns of forced voting come first to mind, i.e. someone coercing you into voting a certain way. But a lot of things can go wrong, specific to computer networking and technology itself:
* A Trojan horse can be planted on a system and activated soon after the voting period starts, calling the election servers and registering a vote on the owner's behalf. This would be subject to reverse-engineering the election process as it goes through on a real host with Wireshark, but feasible with good auto-update code on the Trojan horse.
* An intermediary host meddling with data. This can be a router, WiFi hotspot with hacked firmware, or even an ISP. Mitigated with the use of HTTPS, but users must not bypass warnings of bad certificates!
* (If the election is validated by name) Brute-forcing names and hoping to hit a Canadian citizen's name.
* (If the election is validated by GeoIP) Using a Canadian host as a proxy.
* Other countries' nationals could rig the election (see the comment below about 4chan rigging the election) if validation is not performed or performed incorrectly.
So, yeah. It might work. But it has to be foolproof as much as possible. Maybe send each citizen a card with an online access code? But the non-technological means of tampering with a person's vote will still apply, i.e. coercing them by one way or another, or even the lure of financial gain: "here, pay you 20 bucks to vote for Mr. X"... which is a way for the system to become corrupted.
So again: Do not want.
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1894028,00.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Online finances have proven to work. Treat voting with the same level of security and attention, and you've got a winner in my opinion.
Health Freedom is almost as popular as Freedom itself.
This is just treating a symptom of the problem that people don't feel like they need to vote. We (I live in Canada) should really be doing more to make people feel that their vote counts, and that it is a person's duty to vote. Sure, voting through the internet may be easier, but it won't make people want to vote more.
Why don't people vote anymore? My guess is our decentralized culture these days. In the past people got their news, entertainment, information, etc. from the same general sources -- usually local. Now everyone seeks everywhere for these things. When an election comes about, people don't even know who the candidates are let alone what are the issues at hand.
We need to treat the source of the problem. We need to get people rallied (in a word) to vote. We need a centralized place where people, especially young people, can get information on the candidates, their parties, and the issues they plan to attend to. Honestly, most of this information gets lost in today's culture.
I would rather it take actual effort to vote. That includes driving out to a centralized location, with other people, etc.
Because its much easier to get dumb people all riled up to vote one way if all they have to do is click a mouse button. Whereas they have to take action and maybe an hour of their day to go and vote the current way.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
This is not really news, at least not for myself. I have produced a short report in 2002 with the issues related to e-voting for the GOC and I even suggested minimum requirements, so they were already looking at this back then.
Not much have changed since at probably not much will change in the future with regards to the issues. I guess they will simply go forward with it to save money when it will be politically acceptable.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
and let me tell you, our money is far more attractive to criminals than our votes will ever be.
will online voting increase voter participation? not likely in the long run. will making people feel that they are actually being represented and having their voice heard increase participation? most likely yes.
we've had paper ballots for decades and decades, it's doubtful that the method of voting is causing the problem here.
Online voting is great for things like stockholder's meetings where you don't have a secret ballot.
I've yet to see a vote-from-home system be it internet, phone, mail, or private courier that is guaranteed anonymous and guaranteed auditable even in the face of a corrupt poll worker. Even paper ballot absentee voting is subject to corrupt officials figuring out who you voted for.
For that matter, some forms of at-the-poll balloting aren't guaranteed to be anonymous.
I can think of one scheme that might work but I'm sure there are bugs in it since I'm typing it in off the cuff:
You send a doubly-encrypted vote back to a vote-taking machine that affirms you are eligible to vote. It "decrypts" the ballot resulting in two files: Your encrypted voter registration ID and your encrypted ballot. It prints these out then scans the printout and sends the scans back to you over an encrypted channel. You can print this out if you want. This is your "receipt" and is a deterrent against anyone trying to delete your vote from the system.
It then dumps the voter registration printout into one hopper, and the vote into another hopper and updates a counter. The "hopper system" adds some randomness so there is no way to determine votes by order of arrival. The hopper is also translucent so observers can mark down when a vote is cast, but can't take a picture of the ballot or the voter registration info.
At the end of the day, the voter registration information is scanned, decoded, and printed, and separately, the ballots are scanned, decoded, and tallied. If the numbers don't add up to the counter the machine recorded, then something bad happened.
This does have one disadvantage over in-person voting: Absent biometric identification, there is no way to know who is casting the vote at the other end. You can't know that I didn't sign my senile wife up to vote over the Internet and use her password to vote. Then again, this is true for paper absentee ballots too - signatures are easily forged if you have a sample handy, and with a senile voter, they may be easy to get an original signature from the actual voter then cast the vote for her.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Your Body (Content) Goes Here.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
There's no problem here so nothing needs to be changed. The reason that turnout was low (by Canadian standards - still good by American standards) was that few people saw the election as likely to change anything. And it isn't as if it is hard to vote in Canada. There are lots of convenient polling places and there is no significant wait. You can be in and out in less than five minutes. If voting is that easy and people still don't bother, they don't care. Let the people who are paying attention to the candidates and the issues vote. What good does it do to make it even easier for apathetic voters to vote?
Okay, so the financial network systems are pretty well trusted. I wonder if we could use those as a means of voting? Let's say we transfer $1 to or from an external account which automatically transfers that same amount back. The account designated would be the candidate being voted for... well, no... that would eliminate "write-ins" wouldn't it.
The problem with online voting, which I seek to resolve in my mind, would be an effective way to track your vote and later prove your vote in the event of a recount.
The issue with electronic or even internet voting is the issue of accountability and traceability. "Trust" is a result of either a history of reliability or a preponderance of evidence that the thing is worthy of trust. We need the ability to verify a vote was recorded properly and that only proper votes were recorded. If those can't be done with sufficient public trust, they shouldn't be done.
The main reason the turnout for the last election was so bad was because we shouldn't have had it. There was no real solid issue being fought, and the leaders weren't worth voting for. That's why Mr. Dion is no longer the head of the Liberal party. We wasted millions of dollars for effectively the same government as we had before, give or take a few seats. People just didn't care at that point. There was some talk of having a summer election over possibly EI reform or some non issue like that. Fortunately that didn't happen. We'd just wind up with another minority government with possibly the Liberals in control, but effectively the same dysfunctional mess we've been stuck with for years now.
Eventually a big enough issue will blow that'll cause a good old fashioned proper election. Then we'll see a proper turnout because people will actually care about what's going on. Lack of access to polling stations isn't stopping people from voting. Elections Canada is like any other government office, it's staffed by morons who don't understand the job they were hired to do.
And that was the last Terry Fox run I ever participated in.
If your voter turnout is low, instead of the epic fail that is electronic voting, why not legislate and make voting compulsory?
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
Ultimate challenge, NOT an easy problem to solve:
Design a vote-from-home system which is guaranteed to preserve anonymity and guaranteed to be tamper-evident against fraud. You are not required to account for failures in ballot delivery to or from the voter i.e. internet failure, other than to realize when an attempted delivery failed or at least that a ballot sent out was not received.
Real-world challenge, actually 3 challenges, may be very doable:
Design a vote-from-home system that has similar characteristics as the most secure voting system known to man, where "secure" is defined as:
*Challenge #1) the best preservation of anonymity known to man, i.e. best protection against intimidation/loss of privacy. This is not too hard.
*Challenge #2) the best protection against ballot-tampering known to man, i.e. best fraud protection of the actual vote. This is easy.
*Challenge #3, actually a whole range of challenges of varying difficulty) for a given voting district, create a system that is at least as anonymity-preserving and at least as tamper-protected as the current system used by the majority or plurality of their voters.
In other words, if I'm in some county in Idaho and I am looking to buy your system, and a majority of my voters vote at the ballot box on voting day using optical-scan cards and certain protocols to prevent tampering and prevent anonymity leakage, I expect your system to be at least as good as protecting anonymity and protecting the integrity of the count as the system I have now.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
in Zurich, Switzerland. If you are interested and understand german you can take a demo vote here: https://evoting.zh.ch/
The bottom line is that SSL, A3 certificate and mutual authentication is a save. Saver than using voting machines, I'm sure. This methods are much saver than paper and pen voting. There may have problems with this kind of technology but make no mistakes, a peace of paper is way less secure than this.
Some states have the polls open for weeks, but you have to actually to to the polls and cast your ballot and show a voter's card or ID card or both. It's "no excuses" voting. You can still get a mail-in ballot if you need one.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Maybe send each citizen a card with an online access code? But the non-technological means of tampering with a person's vote will still apply, i.e. coercing them by one way or another, or even the lure of financial gain: "here, pay you 20 bucks to vote for Mr. X"... which is a way for the system to become corrupted.
So again: Do not want.
Posting out voting codes would break the secret ballot, as codes are linked to people (even if promises were made to destroy the link data after the poll).
But this problem could be avoided by having people choose their own voting code card from thousands displayed on tables when they attend a polling station for their next regular vote. Then there's no way to connect a code to a person.
But as you pointed out, the problem of making it easy to sell your vote remains, disenfranchising the poor. But the problem may be manageable in countries that are sufficiently rich and have sufficiently strong democratic traditions.
I'm reminded of this article by Steven Levitt, author of "Freakonomics", which he ran in the NYTimes around 4 years ago.
On page 2 Levitt describes how when Switzerland switched to mail-in ballots, it had record low voter participation. The author seems to feel that people primarily vote because it is a social event. By removing the human element, Levitt feels that Switzerland removed the only thing that made voting worth doing, since he feels the chance of someone's vote affecting the outcome of an election is diminutive.
...I tend to argree with Levitt, at least about the social dimension of voting. I'd argue that changing to mail in ballots or online voting makes the event less social... and less fun. And this will have extremely serious impacts on elections, possibly more so than 4chan rigging a lolcat to win an election or whatever.
This is why you need compulsory voting like Australia has. 95% turnout. And our elections are less about partisanship and more about who's the best man for the job (or who is the lesser wanker).
Then again, America and Canada can't even manage proportional or preferential voting, and the Libertarians would go nuts about the extreme 'coercion' that is being forced to vote once every 3 or 4 years, so who am I kidding.
Boss, do you have a minute? I'm ready to vote and can use the extra cash.
People don't vote because it always comes down to the lesser of two evils. I live in Vancouver Canada and our political system is so deeply broken it fails in almost every respect. Under the current rules we will never get a functioning government the people actually believe in.
If there was a candidate worth voting for, people would vote. Go ahead and make voting mandatory, they already tie our names to the elections canada voting list from a check box on our income tax return so that would be no problem... but if they can't give people someone to vote for, give them a way to voice their displease and have a NON OF THE ABOVE option. Then count all the NON OF THE ABOVE votes and report them for all to see, only then will the people will be heard.
What! Do I look like a people person?
Think about how online tax returns are handled.
When my country was young you had to walk 50 miles in the snow to vote and 50 more miles to get home. It was uphill both ways. At least you got a break when you got to the polling station because it was nice and warm standing in line for 2 days.
Oh and we liked it that way!
PS: 5 minutes between posts? That's a bit on the long side guys. It should be something like: 2 posts in 10 seconds, 3 posts in any 60-second period, 4 posts in any 2-minute period, 5 posts in any 3-minute period, and after that maybe add 2 minutes to the period for each additional post, so 25 posts in 45 minutes. OK, maybe after the 10th post add 5 minutes per additional post. That would be 10 posts in 13 minutes, and 25 posts in 88 minutes. If monopolizing is a real problem, at some point, maybe after the 10th or 15th post in a short period of time, make it 10 or even 20 minutes between posts until the initial posts "age away." I'm not so picky on the actual numbers as I am in allowing posters who have, say, half a dozen replies to post to do it without undue delay.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Canadian voting machines currently come in two types: "Number 2" and "HB". There has been some talk about how "Number 2" style voting machines producing inaccurate results, but nobody has been able to prove that yet.
Canadian elections are a very simple matter. Voters head off to their local polling station, usually a school or community centre, request a ballot or ballots from the elections officer who is usually accompanied by an observer from each of the major parties trying to make sure that nothing unusual happens, and then heads off to a simple wooden desk with a big cardboard screen on it. The voter marks a big 'X' in the circle located next to the appropriate candidate or referendum answer and then folds up the ballots and slips them into the big cardboard box next to the officer and observers.
That's it. No butterfly ballots, no hanging chads, no touch screens, no voting on what kind of potatoes should be served in the cafeteria on Capitol Hill and what they should be called, just one vote for your local representative and possibly a referendum question which is actually important. Ballots are counted by hand and the results released later that evening after all of the polls close.
Why mess around with a system that works?
I imagine would be in favor of online voting for some reason....
you've been able to vote via post for years. explain who this is any less secure?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The silliness of the electronic voting machine -- and, also, online voting -- is that these contraptions are intended to (1) protect a voter from his own stupidity and (2) protect a voter from his own laziness. Frankly, why should we care if a voter is too stupid or too lazy to vote?
This entire electronic voting craze began after some voters in Florida could not follow simple instructions (on the voting ballot) in the American presidential election of 2000. Because they lacked the intelligence to follow simple instructions, they created ballots that were ambiguous.
These instructions are not rocket science. They are written so that a child in 8th grade can understand them. If a voter lacks even the intelligence to follow simple instructions, he likely lacks the intelligence to comprehend foreign policy and domestic policy. The loss of his vote is not a loss to democracy. An uninformed vote by an idiot would actually damage our democracy.
The other issue is the lazy voter. This online voting proposal mentioned by the "Vancouver Sun" is supposed to cater to him. Well, if a voter is too lazy to vote, then he is likely too lazy to make an effort to understand foreign policy and domestic policy. The loss of his vote is not a loss to democracy.
The bottom line is that paper ballots work just fine. We should continue to use them. Forget the electronic voting machines and online voting. They are far less safe and less reliable than mere paper ballots.
Let's keep the paper ballots.
Being able to register online or update your registration information online, if it is well-implemented, would be great. Already, Elections Ontario lets you check if you are on their register of electors. Being able to easily correct that information or update it online would be great.
However, actually registering to vote is not something that most Canadians have to do - unless they explicitly opt out, they get registered by doing things like filing their tax forms or renewing their driver's licence. The provincial and federal electoral organizations share their list of voters with each other regularly.
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
"Elections don't matter, it's the thought that counts".
The only good party worth voting for was the Progressive Conservative, which is no longer around.
The Green Party was ok, based on their FOSS policy, than in the last two elections they ran former Microsoft employees, or spouses of Microsoft employees. Their policy around freedom was good, than it went to non-existing.
The Liberals in the 90s took away everyone's freedom, and Allan Rock ensure Police could use 'Public Safety' as a reason to issue and excute warrants. These warrants could be issues at any time by any judge based on evidence which is with held from the person they search their home of for 90 days. The items seized with the search warrant can be autioned off after 90 days since the no notification is needed to be provided to the person they took the items from.
Various other '911' type laws were passed by the Liberals in the 90s, for example being a legal firearm owner, you automaticly provide premission to the Police to search your home 24/7. Having a firearm license also allows the Police to contact your friends, family and neighbours about your activities and lifestyle. Their homes can also be searched if your firearms are not home when the Police search your home for the firearms.
The NDP is nothing more then whiney wannabe Liberals. Mr. Broadbent, was their last good leader.
It would be nice if Canada had a Priate Party, or leaders like Mr McCain. Canada needs a party to stand up and bring freedom back to Canadians.
You should take time to research Oregon's voting system. It's done by mail, has several levels of excellent security, allows voting over a reasonable period, and is almost impossible to fake, spoof, steal identities, or otherwise bugger. It also generates very high voter participation.
Just asking... How about a "None of the above" vote.. That can win.
If none of the above wins - the current office holder stays but a new vote is taken with new candidates. The process continues until someone is voted in.
Oh and online voting in America - DO NOT WANT EITHER.
If people are not interested about politics, then why would they be more interested about it only because they can vote from the net or by using electronic methods? Another question is, if they don't care enough about their vote to go to the poolling booth, or use the many available way to vote by anticipation or by mail, couldn't we consider that their vote isn't that important anyway? If they don't care about who will govern them, then that's fine by me that their choice doesn't influence who will get elected (and then, they shouldn't complain if they are not happy with who govern them).
I suspect that allowing online voting will do very little to make people more interested about politics, and not change by much the participation level (unless they is fraud or bugs, which can happens as Florida taught us).
Also, if we stop having a general election every few months, perhaps more people will go to vote.
Finally, few years ago I participated to a forum organised by the Province of Québec about this same question (online voting), and in short the conclusion was that it was cheaper, more reliable and easier to prove the legitimacy of the results by continuing to manually count the vote the old way (I also personnaly find it exciting to see the results comming in progressively in a spread of few hours). Also in the conclusion was that the advantages of electronic or online voting wasn't obvious enough to justify taking risks with the current voting method. It finally said that we should wait until electronic vote has been proven successful in some other countries before considering this question again, because the current voting mecanism works reasonnably well and that its legitimacy is well recognized so that we can wait until the other countries have resolved the many issues involving online voting before adopting it.
As the events in Iran show, hand-counted vote != fair vote.
I think, the older I get, I just come to the realization that the vote is really more about the appearance of actually having a say in your government. The vote in Iran was probably rigged. The 2004 U.S. election showed significant voting irregularity in several counties in New Mexico and Florida, in the case of the latter the bunk counties were apparently running the same type of machine (optical scanning). It's pretty well accepted nowadays that JFK was voted in thanks to the mob rigging the election in Illinois.
The problem is, this is all impossible to prove...E.U. citizens, for example, think their vote is fair, but is it? Was the Iran vote fair? Who the hell really knows.
Therefore, I guess my point is, I don't really believe in the veracity or any vote, anywhere, anymore.
And even if the vote is counted accurately, we are all really just voting for the people that corporations and powerful people have pre-approved for us, since any true grassroots candidate will be either tarnished, destroyed, or assassinated before they have a chance at real power anyway.
So, armed with all those conclusions...sure, go ahead. They might as well go ahead and make it so "my voice can be heard" (yeah, right), without making me walk down to the damned polling booth.
gameDB
Yeah, online voting never fails.
Yes but, the same objections are valid in America and the powers that be want Internet voting for us too. (or for US too)
The voting ballet needs to be GPL'd.
Boom.
"And in a stunning upset today, winning by a landslide write-in Stephen Colbert has been elected permanent supreme ruler of Canada."
who can't be bothered to go to a polling station to have an effect in an election?
I can only see the minor inconvenience of having to get off your ass in order to vote as a great way to filter out those that obviously don't care enough (and are likely as informed about the issues).
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
> Canada Considering Online Voting In Elections
"And the winner is.... The Republic Party.... LOLWOT?"
First past the post or single member plurality voting is what keeps Canadians away from the polls. Because each riding only has one rep who only needs a plurality of votes (generally 30%-45%). Any vote for a non-winner is discarded and contributes nothing to parliament but a small government subsidy to the party receiving the vote. This effectively means that the majority of votes cast have no effect. Canadians and citizens in other democracies which suffer from this archaic voting system don't vote because they know it won't do any good. FPTP was designed to ensure there are only ever two viable groups of elites competing for power; it does the job very well and people don't like it.
Whats the worse case scenario with this? Do we Slashdoters 6have no faith in the security of the tubes?
in Canada it would be such a gr8 experience . imagine they have onlince voting system in iran with the current Dictator . am sure he would make it up to 00100.9% .
Slashdot readers generally agree that voting machines such as those from Diebold are a bad idea
Do we? I don't remember the poll. What's worse, if there was a poll, I'm not sure my vote was counted.
Seriously, though: citation needed.
Just asking... How about a "None of the above" vote.. That can win.
If none of the above wins - the current office holder stays but a new vote is taken with new candidates. The process continues until someone is voted in.
Oh and online voting in America - DO NOT WANT EITHER.
Is that true? Do they have to be new candidates, or can the same people run again? Where I live (but can't vote), "none of the above" votes go to the majority... so people rather don't vote if they don't like anyone or tamper with the ballot, so it can't be counted.
But wht abt te Amish? They don use hitec. They r stil agrarian. They refus t use te internet, handys, etc. If they hav t vote online o electronic they wil refuse t vote.
You're forgetting a few people that way:
- Disabled people or that need help in any way
- Those away on business
- Those living abroad
Leaving that aside, an online offering also has other implications from a logistics point of view. The gaming in the US election wasn't just based on Diebold kit that was taking simple mathematics to depths not even equalled by UK MPs on expenses, it was also in failing to supply enough machines to areas that happened to have an unsupporting audience, and the ones that were supplied just happened to malfunction a lot without any support to get them running again (I'm not telling you anything new here, it's all documented). Oh, and no human could possibly alter the outcome of the election so you fix that too..
In summary, if you base a voting on online mechnisms, at least that part of the game is out of action.
However, as far as I know there is only one company in the whole world who has actually solved the electronic identity problem that you have with every single eGovernment idea: how do you prove the user is indeed who he/she says she is. That's a depressingly low count, but at least the company is Swiss which makes their idea less prone to "creative interference" from people in black suits with sunglasses..
Insert
So often the response by politicians to low voter turnout is to propose measures like postal ballots or internet voting (because voting is SO difficult and time consuming) rather than addressing the problem that such a large chunk of the electorate see none of the candidates as worth voting for or the whole process as meaningless, changing nothing.
Although I see many (obvious) problems with this system. It's out only way to get Harper the fuck out there. Seriously, I'm ashamed of my country, how it's changing, and who's running it more and more every day. Canada isn't Canada anymore - not as long as Harper (and his Government) reign.
Blow up my plane? Nuke ten of your airports.
I can file my taxes online. This is nearly as important on an individual basis as voting as far as privacy and security of the information is concerned. Nearly all Canadians file their taxes online, have for years. I don't know anyone who would be opposed to online voting.
Give every registered voter 2-8 different numbers (it should be random, so people can't say "show me all 5 of your numbers") that could be used to vote, but only one of them works (it has an easily removable sticker, or other mechanism, on it that says it works). If you use any of the numbers to vote, it looks like you're voting normally, but the vote is only added to the tally if you're using the right number. So you could bring the invalid numbers to work, collect your bonus, then send in your real vote with the correct number,
As one of the few people on this site who has actually created an internet based voting and registration system (mine was for the US government) I have a few opinions based on my experience. First, online voting has already been tried by a number of countries, including the UK (the island didnâ(TM)t sink afterward), and found to not increase voter turnout. So if their goal is to increase voter turnout they might want to consider encouraging candidates who the populace finds interesting rather than trying a technology fix. Second, most paper or mechanical based systems are so broken that theoretically internet voting should be better. In practice the broken parts of the current systems are codified in law and so the Internet equivalent systems end up being as bad or worse than the paper/mechanical systems.
Once again based on experience here is what is required for this to work:
1. Laws in the country that actually support building effective secure systems
2. Visibility into the process of building the system and open code review (notice I did not specify open source though it is a possibility)
3. A national ID with a machine readable electronic identifier built into the ID
4. A willingness by the populace to use the system
5. A number of test runs of the system where voting is done on a topic that is interesting but will not affect the operation of the government
6. A secure platform to do the voting over (aka your pc is not secure and this by the way is most difficult part)
7. A long voting period so that DOS attacks cannot completely disable the system
So there are actually a bunch more things that need to be considered but this list will get you a long way down the road. And yes Internet based voting will eventually win out even with all of its detractors and problems. So cheers to Canada for giving it a go!
piratepartyofcanada.com
drop over have more of a say perhaps its time we had some new faces in parliament
As a young Canadian, I can say that there is no party that even remotely has policies close to my own beliefs and anyone that would have the same view on issues either would be an independent or belong to a party that doesn't stand a chance of running things. For a while this kept me from voting at all, until recently I realized if everyone felt that way and never bothered voting, nothing would ever change, so I started showing up, waiting in the long line and casting a vote. Every time I've voted, my candidate has lost, which is somewhat disheartening, but maybe eventually more peopel of my viewpoint will start voting and things will slowly change.
As for online voting, you'll see more young people vote as the hassle and time away from your own personal life won't be as interrupted as it is now. Security would have to be very thorough to ensure validity of votes.
The biggest issue in voter turnout though is that the candidates are most often not worth voting for. The individual representative is irrelevant in the big picture as party politics rule all and when a MP votes their own mind, they are swiftly removed from the party and then sit as an independent with next to no say. First time MP's have said that they were appalled at the state of the legislature.
The system is broken, the candidates are broken. We need a complete purge and overhaul.
Just asking... How about a "None of the above" vote.. That can win.
If none of the above wins - the current office holder stays but a new vote is taken with new candidates. The process continues until someone is voted in.
That makes "none of the above" more or less equivalent to voting for the incumbent. Better would be to whatever is done if the post holder resigns or drops dead. There's also a difference between a strong "none of the above" which dosn't allow the candidates to restand and a weak one which does...
"voter turnout in our most recent election was the worst on record"
Geez that couln't have anything to do with the new voting regulations that prevented a lot of people from voting (mainly young people without their driver's license). For those that didn't know, in the last election we had to prove our address in addition to our identity using a card with both your picture and your address and a utility bill with your name and address on it, OR show two cards with your name and address.
It has nothing to do with being able to vote online, it has nothing to do with being lazy
20% of this fucking country cannot stand to stomach any of the candidates running in their areas.
I didn't vote this time and it was on purpose. God damnit get it through your tick skulls, we want some reasonable non-lying candidates!!!
Every broken promise is a 'I'm not voting for him again' then 4 years later the next guy rapes me in the ass too.. well guess what none of them are getting my vote just to rape me and my country in the ass!!
There is a huge void.. and if I wasn't so piss poor as a result of the crappy government we have I would run myself. Even though I'm not a good speaker or popular at least I could maybe show people that there is a sector that is crying to be able to vote but just cannot!!!
Oh but of course no-one would hear about me because the local news would marginalize me and only cover other candidates, and I don't have the money to hire people to go around planting signs and passing out flyers and whatever else.
As long as we allow candidates to spend *ANY* money on the election process we are all doomed to vote in rich fucks who stamp all over us.
We don't need more election funding we need *LESS*... make flyers and ads illegal!! all they do it cloud the issues.
And a swan song for the losing candidate.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
You didn't address anonymity or recounts.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Certain advantages to that...say, in case your government passes a "Patriot Act" that lets them put a "black box" - no questions asked - in any phone switching center or ISP head end or...anywhere. "Black boxes" can have so...many...capabilities.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Once this starts, all sorts of issues will occur via immediate votings. Think referendums. Politiicians lose too much power and frankly hate direct democracy, as they become disintermediated.
So they will fight this to the end.
If you had asked me this question say 10 or 12 years ago I would have jumped on the bandwagon and said "Fsck Ya!".
However upon thinking about it and seeing some of these sort of automated systems work in the meantime, would have to change my vote to "No Thanks".
In one corner you may get more people to vote, it might be more convenient, and results could be pretty much real time, all of which is kind of nice.
On the other side, there is just way too much potential for abuse.
Some have mentioned about coercion and votes and such, but that does not scare me as it would have to be at a scale to make it ridiculous to make any difference in the end result, and frankly if it does we have bigger problems. What would be more worrisome to me is electronic tampering to simply just change votes. With the paper system, you have actual evidence, that would be hard to duplicate. You have physical people, who are responsible for, and also there to take the blame for if things go bad at each particular level, which makes the system accountable. It also allows for an audit of the results, and an investigation.
So while there are some potential pluses to running an electronic system and perhaps someday we will, I would have to say that low tech is the right tech for something this important. I believe it will work in the future, but identification verification and auditing technologies would have to be more advanced to make it work. This is partially a technological issue, but I think even more so a social shift. We will reach some saturation point in technological integration of citizens and then it may be feasible, but I do not think we are there just yet.
Seriously, the only reason there wasn't a big Canadian population for our last election, was because hardly anyone took it seriously. We had to go to the polls TWICE in a normal term, meanwhile being forced to choose between 5 parties whose representatives we weren't exactly too cheerful about. It's not a question of unavailability- it's a question of indifference to the whole thing.
I am quite confident the next election will go much smoother.
It would be transparant, because it would be run by Elections Canada. I have full faith in them to be able to develop a fully transparant online voting system.
Heck the system could have public live feeds of the votes coming in. So you vote, you get a private unique confirmation number that is not stored affiliated with you, so it can not be reversed. You transmit it via a mechanism like www.passwordwindow.com, so it can't be intercepted, and the person has to write it down on paper. You can then look at the public feed by your confirmation number to confirm that your vote is accurate. Then you discard the confirmation number.