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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
How is coercion easy for walk in voting when no one but the person voting can definitely know who the person voted for?
When voting online, someone could be standing over your shoulder making sure you are voting for who they want you to vote for.
For all this whining about Diebold, most people don't have a problem using Diebold's ATMs for banking.
You know immediately if your banking transaction worked. You know at the end of the month if it worked for someone else, and there are bank guarantees. (Why did you think all the ATMs have cams?)
All they can steal with from your bank is some of your money. Not your country.
If you seriously believe you have offered a good analogy I submit you are clueless about the problem at issue.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
DO NOT WANT
And as a Canadian let me say that the reason that "voter turnout in our most recent election was the worst on record" was because THE CANDIDATES SUCKED. I almost voted for the Communist just because I didn't know him and therefore didn't want to punch him in the face.
And then there's the fact that you have to vote for the party and not the person, so if I hate Harper but like the local Conservative I'm screwed. So, to cast a vote I feel good about, both the local guy and the party leader have to be good. Two good politicians? This never happens.
Online voting won't fix a bunch of broken parties, it'll just make tech-savvy people ignore online voting just like they ignore real voting. Let's face it, it's damn easy to vote. If you can be arsed to get to the polling site, that's the hardest part. After that it's having your name checked off and marking an X. If you catch it outside the rush it's faster than popping over to the 7-11 for a Big Gulp. Seriously, if people are too lazy or indifferent for that, then anything with a more complex authentication strategy than an online "BRING BACK CANCELLED SHOW X!" petition is going to be too much work too.
This post contains one blatant falsehood and one technically true but extraordinarily misleading fact. The election was called because Parliament(not the government) was dissolved by the Governor General. However, all elections in Canada are called after Parliament is dissolved by the GG, so that was nothing new. The GG had zero choice in the matter anyway, as the GG is required by constitutional convention to follow the "advice" of the Prime Minister of Canada. It was the PM and the governing Conservatives who really called the election -- the GG dissolving Parliament is only a formality. To blame it on the opposition is ridiculous and has no basis whatsoever in fact.
Think about how online tax returns are handled.
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.
This internet voting would be absolutely fabulous! I could make sure that my wife votes correctly and not some socialist hippie party. I think we need this in Finland too!
You don't know what you don't know.
But the problem may be manageable in countries that are sufficiently rich and have sufficiently strong democratic traditions.
I disagree. In practice the elections in Canada would not really be adversely affected by online voting provided reasonable precautions were in place now. But sooner or later we'll have our own Ahmadinejad ... or Bush v Gore ... and it'll explode in our faces.
Voting and elections in general are the fundamental expression of democracy, they should always be run low-tech, readily available to the public for scrutiny by the parties, and manual recount.
Remember, an election is essentially a peaceful overthrowing of the government, and the installation of a replacement. The governments role in the process should really be to facilitate the public conducting the election as at arms length as is practical.
I suspect the reality in a first world country is that you can't do this to the tune of enough votes without being far too obvious.
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
Banking and voting are fundamentally different. With banking, both you and your bank keep separate records of all transactions, and you can do a balance at the end of the month if you suspect something. You can be absolutely sure at the end of the month that the bank is playing fairly with your money. With voting, the system cannot retain a link between the voter and the vote after it has been cast. Therefore, there's no way for an individual to be sure that their vote was counted. The only way to feel secure is for the system to be transparent. Nothing could be less transparent than an online voting system. There's too much crud in the technology stack to for you to be certain that what you saw on your screen is really what was recorded at the other end.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain