Slashdot Mirror
Canada To Adopt On-Line Voting?
belmolis writes "Here in Canada we have an old-fashioned paper ballot voting system that by all accounts works very well. We get results quickly and without fraud. Nonetheless, Elections Canada wants to test on-line voting. From the article: 'The head of the agency in charge of federal elections says it's time to modernize Canada's elections, including testing online voting and ending a ban on publishing early election results.' Is it worth trying to fix a system that isn't broken?"
I want to check the code. Diebold elected Bush, we don't need that here.
Progress ... slow but sure. The US Congress, Senate & White House will get around to this after I'm dead & buried. Of course, if I'm buried in Chicago I still might get a chance to use it once or twice ;-)
Online voting will be conducted through Warcraft's Arathi Basin battleground. Users must authenticate through battle.net and choose horde or alliance. Whichever team holds the Blacksmith point will be able to vote once per minute until 9 PM. Live results will be posted in Ironforge and Orgrimmar as voting happens.
Please note there is a limit of 3.78x10^19 voters allowed in each instance.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I have worked on the software including in depth code reviews for 7 makers of the voting machine software. It stinks to the high heavens of means and methods to provide vote fraud. Canada should retain a paper ballot. It is OK to count them electronically but the count should be validated and it should be recounted by independent agency of the original count. It should be electronically transmitted to 3 different locations for totalling at the same time. It should be locally counted as well. Clearly the process must also be open source for the software whereby citizens and groups like "Black Hat" can take a crack at it making sure it is secure. Bluntly modern technology can easily become a modern means of theft and we need to make sure it isn't such. Considerable data indicates that in the USA such systems have produced fraud. These include the flipping of primary results from Hillary Clinto to Barak Obama in the last election there for president. They include questionable results in at least 2 US states. Wake up Canada, the time had come to trust but verify!
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, the Pope, and the President of the US are the survivors of a shipwreck in a life boat, but the supplies are limited: there's enough for one to last until rescue. After the Pope and the President lay out their opinions as to why they should be the one to remain with the boat while the others take their chances in the open ocean, Daley suggests a vote, to which the others agree.
Richard Daley is elected to remain with the life boat by 13,392 votes.
The politicians have learned how easy it is to "adjust" the electronic ballot boxes and are falling over themselves to have their crack at controlled elections.
Is it worth trying to fix a system that isn't broken?"
If it means less transparency for the system, then I say yes, lets fix the system. Because more transparency generally means that corporations make less money, and the less money corporations make the less well off society is in general.
Electronic voting is much easier to manipulate than more conventional methods. And it is impossible to check, thus avoiding all those inconvenient jail sentences for vote fraud.
"Is it worth trying to fix a system that isn't broken?"
It is to the people who sell electronic voting systems. And they apparently have better lobbyists than the average voter.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
What's wrong with publishing early results?
The real problem with elections is voter turnout.
There are 2 reasons why people don't go vote:
1- The parties all suck and the voter doesn't feel that one winning over another would make any difference, and;
2- People are too lazy to drive down to the polls and wait in line to vote.
For problem 1, not much we can do except start a new party. For problem 2 however, a system where you can vote online might be able to help. For identification, perhaps combining your SIN number and passport number or last year's taxable income would be sufficient.
~Syberz
Yes, our election system here in Canada works pretty well. No, it's not perfect. In particular the ban on publishing results is a running joke that was easily circumvented by a ton of people on election night. It's so easy to get around it these days (particularly thanks to helpful foreigners willing to lend a hand by reposting results) that even trying to enforce it just wastes time and makes the government look stupid.
As for online voting... I'm against it. There's a number of reasons why, including that the paper ballots work really well (and are much harder to hack then a website). But I don't see a lot of harm in doing a test. That's the best way to get some real data on how it's going to work. Elections Canada is pretty good at this stuff, so I'm not surprised they want to try it out and gather some first hand data on how it works. There certainly are some cases where it would be helpful, such as far north rural areas where ridings are HUGE and it's a real burden to get to vote. We saw that turnout up north was the lowest in the country and 20% below PEI/New Brunswick (small areas with high turnout). That's worth trying to fix. It's also an option for special ballots instead of mailing out paper forms.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Ending the ban on publishing early election results is a great idea: why shouldn't people in BC be able to vote with as much information as possible?
But online voting is a terrible idea. The only certain way to get an incorruptible paper trail is to use Canada's current paper ballot system. Electronic voting is open to all kinds of abuse, and you're stuck trusting some tech vendor that his code secure.
If a bank transaction is found to be corrupted, you can reverse it even months later. What do you do if you find out an election result was corrupted two years later?
My main concern with any voting is how do you prevent voting fraud?
Internet voting means
* dead people can vote
* husbands can vote for their wives
* people in other countries can tamper with the election servers
* no paper trail
Sure, the convenience would would be nice, but how do you ensure that 1 vote for one person without any fraud? You can't.
I actually think we need to stain fingers in our voting too like they do in other countries to ensure only 1 vote happens per live body.
You can vote online. Direct democracy!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia
Seems it works out for them. I wouldn't mind.
I have done counting on paper ballots, and don't assume that this is in any way more correct. In the end you are working with people, and over a day of managing voters and counting votes you develop leaders and followers, and most of the time the leaders are affiliated with candidates anyway.
So, personally, I'd prefer Estonian style voting.
might solve problem 1 by cutting out the middlemen.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Hell, didn't anyone learn anything from online banking? It can NOT be made secure. Why? Inherently. Because you would have to trust a machine that is not under your control, as the voting agency: The user's computer. And there is no way to verify that his vote is actually his decision. And I'm not even talking about the guy with the gun pointing at his head telling him how to vote.
Here's a scenario that happened in reality a while ago with online banking. Anyone with half a brain should be easily able to tell how to apply it to online voting. We might have to get someone to explain it to a politician, though.
A piece of malware existed (and still exists), that was developed as a reply to the one time pad banks handed out. Since intercepting and using the user's credentials was useless in such an environment, what they did was to manipulate the user's browser to make the user do the malicious transaction himself. What happened was, essentially, this: The malware manipulated (through a BHO) the input and the reply from the bank. The user entered, e.g. that he wanted to transmit 100 bucks to pay his electricity bill. The malware sent that he wants to send 1000 bucks to a mule. The bank replied that those 1000 bucks will be sent to the mule, which the browser displayed as 100 bucks to electronic provider, asking for the OTP-key. The user, thinking he's paying his bill (and everything he saw reflected this) entered the key.
There is NO way the bank (or, in turn, the election committee) could somehow see that the input was manipulated. And in this case, at least it could be seen on the bank statement. How do you expect to at least NOTICE that your vote was altered in a secret ballot?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The idea is great and is the way forward, allowing us to hold many more votes without it really costing anyone time or money (we could actually put ads on the voting site and make the country money if we needed to).
But with the huge concerns raised over electronic voting in the US where it appears moderately possible that that it has been used for fraud over there and at the very least that it would be easy to use for fraud if someone so desired i do not feel comfortable with this development.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I cannot see how on-line voting can possibly stand up against the demand for a secret ballot.
If everyone is allowed to vote in their own home then there is no way to guaranty that the ballot is secret. How can you make sure that no one is shoulder-surfing? Or worse, shoulder-surfing with a big stick? With home (on-line) voting bribing and/or threatening voters becomes trivial and we don't want that!
On-line voting sounds like fun, but it doesn't work.
Funny how the Canadian Conservative government is trying to eliminate our deficite in 4 years by fixing problems that don't exist: E-voting, renaming each part of our military, (anything else I am forgetting?)
The Canadian voting system is known as "First past the post".
It is horribly Horribly broken. So broken in fact that we now have a "Majority" government elected by %40 of the vote. That's right, %60 of the eligible voters who voted, did not vote for the "Majority" that got total power.
If you have any doubts, go to http://fairvote.ca
If any changes should be made to the Canadian voting system, proportional representation should be implemented first.
One problem with online voting is that it isn't in a controlled environment. That means that people can be forced to vote something they don't want to vote. The government isn't able to guarantee anonymous voting either, when they can't control the environment in which the vote is cast. Just something to consider....
For those who don't know, we just had a federal election up here in May. The conservatives, led by a radical right winger, took absolute power (a majority of seats in the house of commons) with only 39% of the vote. 61% of Canadians voted for more centrist or progressive parties that - for the most part - have a fair amount in common, but because the vote was split between the other parties, the conservatives cleaned up.
The system is utterly broken, but the decline in voting rates over recent decades (mostly in younger voters who recognise how appallingly unjust the system is and are disenfranchised by it) won't improve much with online voting techno-fixes. If you want people to engage in their democracy, we need a proportional representation (or at a minimum a ranked-ballot) voting system that makes people feel like their vote won't be wasted because depending on which party you vote for, or chance of where you live.
If we transact billions of dollars a second across bank networks and never lose a cent, with audit trails and incredibly high security...we should be able to have electronic elections, across the internet. Why does this have to be so complicated?
Bearded Dragon
Sounds like people are shooting this down before giving it a chance by comparing it to the republican voting machines they have used at voting stations in the US.
I think its something that should be explored. The implications of this being successful would be great. Even though yes the current system does work without a doubt. Voter turnout is terrible in Canada. If you have the ability to vote online, the voter turnout I think would sky rocket. High voter turn out means politician's have to start to work to appease the mass and not just the people who consistently vote for there own party like in the US. I don't think that's as prevalent in Canada though, based on what we saw up here with the NDP. I hope it works, even though a lot of hurdles around fraud to overcome but I think it can be done.
Online voting will be conducted through Warcraft's Arathi Basin battleground.
Assuming that by Warcraft you mean World of Warcraft: The price per seat of a proprietary commercial video game in which elections are held is effectively a poll tax, and I don't see a poll tax taking off at least in my home country.
Nearly every bank has online banking and you don't read stories about banks getting hacked and money being stolen very often... at least not as often as some who are opposed to electronic or browser-based elections would have you believe.
Just handle it like a bank. The government awards the bank enough votes for each citizen. The government provides emails addresses for each citizen.
Tie the email address to each Social Insurance Number with a random hash and an open key the individual provides, and a password, and a few other password pairs that randomly prompt.
When a person turns the appropriate age, they are allowed to login to the election part of the system, otherwise they get access to all the info they would need about their history as a citizen.
During each election, a person gets one vote they can "spend" per type of candidate they may elect. This vote is closely associated with their registered riding so they can't vote for a candidate outside their registered place of residence.
Now if this was a transparent results-based system, it would be better than the paper system for a number of reasons, namely because it would keep the power to corrupt results out of the local people who are prone to that kind of thing, stealing votes, switching votes, stuffing boxes... etc.
Make the live source code open source. Guard against phishing.
There are reasons this would work. There are things that could make this difficult. But until I hear all the banks screaming that we need to go see them in their brick and mortar buildings, I think online transactions of a secure nature are fine. Put your tinfoil hats away people.
This could be good.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I disagree. It should be a boss that two teams have to race to fight and the first group that gets the boss down wins the right to govern because they have proven they can work as a team, and overcome any future difficult challenge needed to run a government effectively.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Starting a new party doesn't necessarily solve problem #1. You just end up with one more party that sucks.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
I think that the elections all over the world chould be on line , this way we will save money , save the trees and saveour time...
End of Tenancy
In 2008 I waited 6 hours in line to vote...
That was one hell of a election that was politicized more than I think ever in our history - a black man that had a chance to be President?!? A LOT of people had a problem with that. And with the nuttiness on the other side; the turnout was HUGE.
Secondly, I don't know about you, but because of all the media hype about delays and crowds at the early voting polls, many people decided to go early and wait in line for hours (like I stupidly did) because we thought the election day would be a nightmare.
Everyone I know who actually voted on Election Day, were in and out in less than 15 minutes.
D'Oh!
It could work, but only if there were multiple checks and balances, ways to verify things each step of the way, and have a completely audit trail at the end. That's the best way to prevent fraud, however it would also threaten the right to anonymous voting.
At a minimum, it should be possible to print out a voting reciept with a 2d barcode that has all the relevant voting data. That way if there are questions about voting, you can bring the receipt in and officials can scan it for verification.
There must be a happy medium in there somewhere.
Yes, online voting is a challenge to get right, but definitely not an impossibility and should not be written-off right away. If you showed up a the polls to find that somebody had already signed the little book and voted in your place, you'd do something about it. Wouldn't you do the same with online voting?
There is essentially no verification that the voter is who they claim to be at physical polls - just show up and sign the little book (right next to the easily copied sample signature). I still don't understand how this is considered enough to validate a vote.
Billions of dollars in tax revenue/refunds are processed online each year. One fairly straightforward (and arguably much more robust) way to verify voters is to use tax information. When e-filing taxes, one or two numbers from the previous year's return is required as a form of verification. Centralizing the voting computer(s) into a secure data center like the IRS's consolidates the risk of getting hacked. Yes, it's a single point of failure as opposed to hundreds of thousands of individual electronic or paper voting machines, but it can be better controlled and intrusions can be more easily detected. In the case of trojans on voters' computers stealing individual votes - if your computer is infected, you've probably got bigger things to worry about (like your bank accounts and identity).
All of the usual avenues of buying votes and intimidating voters can and will still happen. I don't think that moving voting to the privacy of one's home (as opposed to the privacy of the voting booth) will have an appreciable effect.
Online voting would also potentially save a significant amount of money in the form of polling location costs, transportation costs, ballot counting costs, lost time/wages for voters, lost productivity for employers who provide time off to vote, etc.
I fully acknowledge that there are inherent challenges, but the potential benefits are also quite significant. If implemented by a group of smart people (academics, motivated by pride in democracy, not corporations motivated by political and fiscal gains) and overseen by anybody who cares to look (Open Source the whole thing) I think there is a great chance of success.
Before we get an online voting system we need a political party worth voting for!
I would love to see a preference based voting system and mandatory voting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_voting
So when there are no viable options we can say so instead of not showing up.
They kinda taste like tasty wheat . . . . kinda . . .
"We get results quickly and without fraud."
Without fraud? That's one hell of a lofty claim if I've ever seen one.
I've been thinking about what systems would be required for direct democracy... if we could make all decisions by some system of popular voting, we could remove the entire legislative branch of government. if the people could spend from a pool of points to pass or veto parts of a budget, I wonder what the result would look like. I agree on all the security and other concerns about such a scheme at this point in history, but if it could be done successfully, an interactive, rapid voting system would remove one of the most significant remaining barriers to a functioning direct democracy.
If only a minority of people vote for a system called democracy then that system is broken as everyone should have their say in some aspects of society even if choosing the leader is of no interest to them. Online voting will give people a more targeted say in what they want to choose.
We don't need to follow the Americans in everything! Isn't it bad enough that we elected Harper again?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Instead of spending so much money on the hopeless white elephant of online voting, they should just give out 50 to 100$ cash at the polling station to everyone who actually votes.
Even an online voting system where the whole software stack is open source, hardware is standard commodity hardware, with feeds of the votes cast provided live to all political parties, and with the software stack and hardware specs provided to the parties and independent observers, it would still be impossible to protect against the gazillions of issues on the voter's computers that could still affect the results.
Lol, well it you just copy an existing one or flip flop your position to try and be more popular (ADQ, I'm looking at you) then yeah it's pretty useless.
The big problem, is that if a new party shows up saying that they will do exactly what is needed to make this country better, they will never get elected. Why? Because they would tax the rich and large corporations more, they would gradually cut government jobs by at least 1/3 (while optimizing of course) and eliminate pension plans for new government employees (why should working for the government entitle you to a free retirement? The rest work just as hard, if not harder, and have to finance their own retirement).
~Syberz
> Is it worth trying to fix a system that isn't broken?"
Well, I admit it would make me vote, which I don't do if I have to go somewhere in a waiting line. I would love to see online votes and I'm not alone.
'The head of the agency in charge of federal elections says it's time to modernize Canada's elections, including testing online voting and ending a ban on publishing early election results.'
Why?
Although it was no doubt intended as such, "modernizing" is not a reason. Quite the contrary: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
As far as I can see, the only people who stand to gain are the manufacturers of electronic voting machines and the companies who sell, support, maintain, and otherwise profit from them.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
What could possibly go wrong?
We screw things up so the rest of the world doesn't have to (cheers for the bail-out, we owe you a pint or two)
see the example of Brazil, who does electronic voting for some years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Brazil
Yes, I know, it can't be made secure, etc. There are many problems. If we ever make it viable, however, this could lead to the next stage of natural development in democracy: direct voting on issues. Who needs Congress when every citizen can propose legislation and vote on the propositions of others? Of course ways would need to be developed in order to control the sheer volume, but I think something not too different from /.'s own moderation/meta-moderation could be used for that. This will require a lot more than universal access and e-voting, but it sounds like a good starting point.
The short answer is no. E-Voting is a stupid idea. All electronic forms of voting are more open to error than traditional methods, not to mention manipulation. When it comes to elections I don't care how long it takes to count the votes. Even if it took a week, who cares? It's not like the new government will step in any faster.
When it comes to my elections what I care about is accuracy, reliability, verifiability. The paper method works because everything is done by hand, so there a no/few glitches. It reliable because, well paper is ancient. And finally it is verifiable because there exists a paper trail, which allows recount if there is a dispute.
The system we have right now has worked for a very long time, and it has worked quite well. We don't need anything new or fancy. I like new fancy stuff for somethings, that why I use Debian Testing on my desktop. But when I depend on something to work reliably I use Debian Stable, it may be outdated, but it has been thoroughly tested and has proven its trustworthiness.
I understand that everyone always argues that there is inherent risk in online voting, and that the security is not absolute, but the fallacy to that argument is how do you know that paper is secure? I would argue both systems are by nature insecure, and can be tampered with. I would also argue that you might be able to find that tampering easier in a electronic system....
Let's face it, holding a paper election is EXPENSIVE and electronic voting is CHEAP (once the machines have been paid for). Who cares if ANONYMOUS elects your next prime minister, just think of all the millions of dollars the government will save holding the election.
There have been some forays into online voting in Ontario municipal elections in the past - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Canada#Ontario_2
I have voted online in the past and it certainly has promise compared to having to wait in line at a polling station. Since some fairly important elections are done by postal mail, (in the US Oregon and Washington do (or at least may): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting#States_with_all_vote-by-mail_elections for example) it is at least possible to take reasonable precautions against major voting fraud.
Such a lovely word. Means: "We really don't have any good reason to drop the old system, but we'll talk you into it by present the new system as all *modern* and stuff. You don't want to be out-of-date, do you? All the other governments will laugh at us for being unfashionable."
It takes far more that 30 minutes of study to know enough about a candidate to make an intelligent vote regarding a race.
If you can't be bothered to spend a 30 minutes to an hour to vote, you certainly don't know enough or care enough about the race to vote.
Diebold elected Bush
When was that? If you are referring to the Florida 2000 elections it was the disadvantages of paper ballots that did the trick. Things like hanging chads and butterfly ballots.
I'm not defending Diebold, just want to set the record straight. A bad system is a bad system, no matter the technology used.
I echo the sentiments of others here, DIEBOLD elected BUSH via vote fraud - the flaws are terrible and the results worse. If it must be done, do it NOT via any outside company but by gov't hired, gov't controlled employees, to trust ANY entity other than that is to give up your control of government utterly.
Assumption 1: Online voting is done from home via a web browser, as opposed to 'electronic voting', where badly designed machines get hacked, and elections stolen.
Assumption 2: Online voting can be secure
If both assumptions hold, I say 'build it'! Not because we're broken here in Canada, but because it establishes a new platform for democracy. And that new platform would hopefully, eventually, be extended to voting more than once per election. I'd like to vote on issues smaller than 'who is the next prime minister', like legalizing gay marriage, pot, tax hikes, new highways, environmental laws, etc.etc.etc.
Fortunately, if they stick to their 2006 decision, this can't affect Quebec, who have banned all future ideas related to electronic voting.
On a related note, the only eVoting system I've seen that I would actually trust is Punchscan... note however that it only allows you to later verify that your vote was cast and counted correctly when you come home from the polls. It's not intended for internet voting, which comes with a whole extra set of problems.
I've run a voting booth for a Canadian federal election. Here's how it works.
A voter approaches and must be found on the list, and not marked as having already voted with an absentee ballot. I had a problem or two there.
I tear a perforated strip off the ballot and stuff it in a bag while giving an eligible voter the ballot. The strips are not identified but serve as a check on the number of ballots in the box.
At the end of the voting, all ballots are counted by hand. There is no electronic counting. The number of voters is validated by the names crossed off the list, by the paper strips, and by the ballots themselves. It's ridiculously easy to tell what a vote is as the ballot is all black with white names and a white circle for the voting mark. Party representatives may observe the counting.
Once the count is done, you report it to the head of the polling station. All ballots and documents are secured inside the taped-up ballot box kept.
There's only one real opportunity for fraud, and that's in the deciding for which candidate a ballot has been cast or if a ballot has been spoiled. That fraud has assuredly happened - and was completely ignored, with orders to destroy the ballots. It was a travesty, but at least the cheating side didn't win.
"Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
Professor J. Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan gave a very entertaining talk on voting machine vulnerabilities in the Usenix Security Talk below:
http://www.usenix.org/events/sec11/stream/halderman/index.html
The part on evaluating on-line voting for Washington D.C. is of particular interest (and entertainment).
Because they would tax the rich and large corporations more, they would gradually cut government jobs by at least 1/3 (while optimizing of course) and eliminate pension plans for new government employees (why should working for the government entitle you to a free retirement?
Why tax large corporations more? The wealth they generate will ultimately end up in the hands of shareholders, right? Most of those share holders will be 'the rich', but some of them will be normal people holding shares directly or through mutual funds.
I can already see it... breaking News in 2035: The Canadian Parliament has passed a law declaring Mandarin as the official language of Western Canada and annexing Western Canada to China.
The invasion is already happening... just come to Vancouver and you will see it for yourself :D
Democracy is a farce to begin with. So many people, including me, don't vote because we don't believe in electing a leader. I don't want someone to take all the decisions for the rest of us. I want someone who will ask the people before taking big decisions, I want the people to have a say in any major decisions. We didn't go to Irak and to win that one, we had to massively protest, it shouldn't require this much effort for the voice of the people to be heard at the top.
If would be great to have an online system that is more than about electing a dictator for a few years, an online system that is about asking people what they really want. The elite in Ottawa are just too disconnected from the real life of people and the argument that if we want to change thing, we should get in the system is ridiculous.
So, I find this change intriguing and I would hope that someday, it paves the way for a more "direct democracy" or real democracy where the people decide more than who to make emperor for 4 years.
if they truly end up doing this, then why not go a few steps further, and make decisions on policy questions based on on-line voting?
Do you want to know what real democracy looks like? Like the real mob rule I mean, just implement this: have an on-line referendum for each and every question.
We have a story on /. saying that feelings expressed on Twitter can predict market moves. Well, hell, so the wisdom of crowds works there, come on, do the experiment. Have the crowds use its wisdom for every policy decision, have real direct democracy, I want to see this. It's going to be insanely great - it will end up voting for every single tax increase above certain income level (whatever the national median is, anybody making over that will always pay more and more taxes with every new referendum), and the subsidies for 'poor' and 'middle-class' will be increased with every vote as well.
I want to see this. It's going to be interesting to look at, sort of like a train crash.
You can't handle the truth.
I like the idea, and i know we have the technology to make it happen and have the whole thing secret and secure.
The biggest improvement i see from online voting is the money taxpayers will be saving be cause currently a general federal election (country-wide) costs a fortune because most is done by hand. People who count votes are people like you and me, where one person counts the vote and two others sign off on the count. Many times these three would not agree on a discarded vote which bring the whole voting by hand process to question; You can't really refute an electronically submitted vote compare to a what some can write by hand on the paper ballots.
But as many pointed out, there are other problems with our parliament system, such as the fact that conservative have only one choice of party representation where as more progressive parties like the new main opposition NDP, the thieving Liberals and the Dumb Bloc Québecois along with the Green party that was at our televised debate not long ago.
Many a multiple round approach like the French uses where no right-wing party could ever get majority in the house of commons with just 39% of the general votes.
By the way, i think it was possbile for some voters to vote by email last May. I may have to check up on this ...I'm not 100% sure.
There is an easy way to make online voting totally secure: make it public instead of anonymous.
If everyone's vote was associated with their name, then at any time, they could check to verify that their vote was what they said it was. If it's tampered with, they can cry foul.
Reference the debate on wheteher or not voting needs to be anonymous
Maybe the plan is to just set up computers behind the curtain, and only those computers can be used to vote. You'd still have to go to a voting station, you'd still have to prove your identity the same way, your vote would still be hidden, the only difference is that you'd be putting votes into a database, and not into a box.
Just because it's "online" doesn't mean it would have to be "at home". That may not have been what the article intended, but it's one possible way to do things.
The only problem then becomes how to encrypt the data and prevent your ISP from making changes. Then again, elections Canada staff can always "lose" ballots as well, skewing the results, so I don't know which is harder to trust.
The key metric in the credibility of an electoral system is what is the maximum amount of fraud that can be committed with a small number of people. The paper ballot system is a remarkable piece of engineering when you stop and think about it: you have to be physically present to vote and the physical ballot is accounted for at all times, making ballot stuffing difficult to pull off on a large scale by a small number of people. The observation and counting of votes is distributed, likewise limiting the scope of an fraud.
In any electronic system, the vote moves through countless devices that could be corrupted internally or externally. Any attempt to identify fraud using statistical deviation from polling numbers now trusts the pollsters (whose numbers were wildly skewed in the final days of the last election) as much as the actual vote.
In any centralized counting system, is going to be IT team that the nation has to have absolute trust in: their intregrity, their flawless execution and their ability to detect any tampering.
Note that tampering not only covers changing the results and ballot stuffing, but also removing the veil of annonymity. In an increasingly polarized environment, being flagged in party's database as an enemy voter could easily come to affect how your career prospects in government and how you are treated by a beaurocracy
Finally, its not enough that the election is not tampered with, it needs to be provably tamper-free. It's not enough for the chief electoral officer to be satisfied with the results, the public needs to be confident that for systematic tampering to have occurred that it required a conspiracy too large to realisticly remain secret.
In Finland some politicians were pushing e-voting as well, in the form of e-voting machines. They tried those machines out in a couple of cities, and the results ended up being invalidated in court after claims that some people failed to vote successfully (they didn't understand the UI correctly). There was a huge fuss about this, because the cities had to pay for a new election. I'm glad this happened, because it probably pushed this whole stupid idea several years into the future.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic... if not, I'm sorry to burst your bubble but most of the wealth they generate does not end up in the hands of shareholders. Whatever small part does, is taxed to oblivion. Why should individuals pay a ~30-35% tax rate and corporations only 15%? By 2012, Canada will have the lowest corporate tax rate in the G7; that rate could easily be raised a few percentage points with no ill effects on the economy. Plus, the wealth generated could lead to tax breaks on individuals or debt reduction or deficit reduction.
~Syberz
"We get results quickly and without fraud."
Awwww.... isn't that cute? He thinks there's no election fraud! Don't tell him the truth; true innocents aren't a renewable resource.
The existing HTTPS infrastructure can ensure that the ballot isn't easily eavesdropped on between the user's computer and the election server. This makes an absentee ballot filled out on one's PC or smartphone not unlike an absentee ballot filled out on paper and sent through the mail. Or are you claiming that an absentee ballot in your country gets filled out inside the post office?
Is it worth trying to fix a system that isn't broken?"
What's your definition of 'broken?' Elections are very expensive - Around $300M. Thousands of employees and procedures. If that cost was reduced that money could go to many other things.
If you live in a rural location you might need to drive an hour or more to the polling station - And if it's the winter that means snow, ice, you name it. I'm sure many people would prefer to vote online.
Who do you trust more?
The mainstream media or online resources for information about a candidate?
Are you more likely to overpay for a crappy product you saw on TV and ran to Best Buy to pick up, or online where you can read reviews, see specification, photos, etc. Chances are once you read the 20th one star review you might think twice, no matter how cool it looked on the commercial.
Most voters still don't take the time to research anything. Instead they take their cues from the MSM which is obviously biased on many issues.
Online voting will bring a new level of awareness to voters because they will be able to easily research their decisions at the time of pulling the lever. Also... more people will vote meaning voter fraud would be less impactful unless you were able to change massive numbers at once since each vote would be so diluted.
Basically, this will never happen in the US.
A 15 year old Russian kid is going to single handedly elect the PM of Canada right?
this is the same country where people leave their doors unlocked at night or while they're away. of course they're naive enough to think online voting will work. hell, it might actually work for them precisely because of that trusting mentality. after all, if people were actually breaking into homes a lot, they would start locking them, right?
"why would anyone cheat the vote, eh? that would be dishonest, dontcha know."
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
In my area (southern Ontario) we were able to vote federally by mail-in ballot. Not sure if this is available across the country. Many people did it just for the convenience. I think that is a better idea than online. I'm a web developer and even I have doubts to how this could be done online properly.
With bank transactions the identity of the parties involved is established. How do you separate identity verification in an anonymous ballot ?
Electronic voting is an idiotic idea. Sometimes you need to just clean house on the moronic idealist bureaucrats in your nation. Seems like it's a good time for that. If they institute electronic voting, consider your vote goodbye.
The guy who writes Freakanomics claims that voter turn out went down in Switzerland once people could vote on-line.
The explanation he gave was that paper ballots actually gets more people off their asses because there is some social pressure to actually be seen voting.
Voting on-line gives them an easy out. Oh, yeah, I'm going to vote on-line. But they never got around to it. Oops.
Is it worth trying to fix a system that isn't broken?
Only for the people that can afford to buy the technology to manipulate the votes.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The sooner the globalists can get their boys in, the sooner Canada can be burnt to the ground by the global banksters. You want to fix your elections? Oh they'll be "fixed" alright. You will have "fixed elections" Canada.
inspired by an online poll... yeah you fucking nazis, I have golden bridge for sale in San Francisco.
I still think that online voting should be setup, not to elect politicians but to vote on various issues.
There is no single politician I can vote for that agrees 100% with my views. Sometimes I would side with one party on an issue, sometimes with the opposition party. Unfortunately in the current system I am forced to compromise. If I was able to vote on the issues I care about most then I would be happy.
Fewer politicians required, less greasing of the system by big money, better results for the public.
Maybe one day...
The major parties in Canada know virtually nothing about current technology. As others have suggested, electronic voting is insecure at best and prone to election fraud at worst. Americans have only to look at the fiasco with voting machines to get a small idea of the possibilities. Who ever controls the system can be in control of the results.
A similar argument of ignorance can be made each time the government caves into American big business and re-introduces "copyright reform". It does not benefit the Canadian people. It does not benefit Canadian copyright holders. It only benefits lawyers and American big business.
You know that thing with the viruses and malware and trojans and DoS and cross-site-scripting and identity theft? Let's make the most important decision of the country on there.
Sure you can. We're designing a whole new voting system so you just build in that ability.
No you cannot because, even if your computer system was absolutely 100% secure the electorate will not know that for certain. Just about anyone can see that a paper-based election system is secure and works. You provide physical security for the ballot boxes, they are opened in the presence of, and counted by, representatives of all candidates involved, end of story.
Replace that with a computer-based system and 95% of the electorate now have no clue how it works and so cannot be sure that it is secure and even the 5% (or whatever fraction it is) with decent IT skills cannot be sure that it is secure without knowing the details and having spent the required time to learn them. This is a dangerous state of affairs because when a surprise election result occurs, particularly if it is one that a sizeable number of people will not like, everyone has to be able to implicitly trust that the election was fair. What a computer system is likely to encourage is people questioning the actual result and whether their vote was truly counted. Having a large number of your electorate doing this will massively undermine your democracy which is a bad thing...and this is the case even if you do have a secure which I frankly doubt is really achievable given the stakes involved for people to break it.
For US people: Canadian ballots are not at all like those that we see here. Because we have regular elections (notwithstanding special elections to fill unexpected vacancies and local-gov't elections in many states) we tend to have many, many items on the ballot including people in all three branches of state and local gov'ts in addition to federal (one or two every two years, one to three every four) not to mention ballot initiatives and tax increases. In Canada, there is usually a single race on a ballot. IOW, the problem spec is very different from that of the US.
This past federal election cost $290,000,000.
For a country of ~34,000,000 people.... that sounds pretty broken to me (that works out to $9 per ballot assuming every single person voted, which isn't the case).
MABASPLOOM!
Electoral system reform. You know, so my vote actually counts for something?
Plenty of things aren't broken. I'm sure very old computers weren't broken. That doesn't mean that improvements can't be made. But, under this mentality, nothing would ever likely improve. I'm not sure how on-line voting is reliable, but I don't believe that saying the previous system isn't broken is a very good argument against it.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
If you can bank online you can vote online.
Congratulations, you have just proven that electronic voting is a bad idea. If you were responsible for 100% of fraudulent transactions, could not challenge charges, count not reverse charges, etc ... would use use online banking? Voting is a one time event, there is no do over, at best a fraudulent vote is thrown out.
Direct democracy!
Also known as mob rule. Be careful what you ask for.
Malicious code is the least of the problems with online voting. It becomes almost trivial to buy/extort votes.
You sure about that? Purchasing and extorting votes is a manual process. Malicious code automates the process. Imagine every malware infested PC altering the vote
Among the worst of bad ideas are all that are for schemes to improve voting systems that involve votes disappearing into electrons in a box, any box, however supposedly secure, and then reappearing, or being made to reappear, to reappear from the same box, or from any other box. There is just no accontability for electrons, any electrons, when they are out of sight in boxes
It is not the electrons' fault. They are just too fragile, too ephemeral. They too easily can be made to appear, or to disappear, or be made to shift from one column or category to another, too readily without a trace.
Electronic means are fine for casino machines, where their ready manipulability makes them able to provide wiin correlations that are random, but programable to be within parameters required for house-profit percentages. It is, however, that same programability, which can be set to manipulate results surreptitiously, that makes electronic means anathema in voting situations.
For voting, counters that can be counted by human beings counting in inter-observing groups, so real-time cross-checking may continuously occur, is as high as human honesty can ever, and will ever, allow technology to be employed.
The problem is not a technical one. It is human beings. A constantly varying percentage of Human beings can constantly be relied on to be unreliable, to, in any cross-section of entirely reliable human beings, be relied on to attempt to manipulate.
You can't hide what you do and ask people to trust it. That's the problem with this kind of code. Even for the people that can understand the math, how do they know for sure that the system is not just taking all the shortcuts?
The best system is already in use, and that's the physical ballot, where the voter puts the ballot in a sleeve to hide it from the judges before it goes into the ballot box.
There are some specific details, but computers in any role other than counting physical ballots just get in the way.
You may have the skills to check a few of those boxes on voting day, but are all the non-geeks just supposed to trust you? And what about all the boxes you can't check?
Butterfly ballots are not the only kind of physical ballot.
The hanging chad is only one of the problems.
They were developed when we didn't yet have optical scanning techniques and machines cheap enough to use for elections, and when paper was (comparatively speaking) expensive enough to motivate separating the candidate list from the ballot. (It was still a bad idea, but the motivation can be understood.)
Bubble sheets incorporating the candidate's names, putting the ballot in a sleeve before leaving the voting booth, is about as good as it gets. (And then someone forgets the blanks for write-in.) And those are better than any computer voting system.
A non-vote can be a protest, but changing to a digital system does nothing to help the protest be registered.
And it opens up a huge bunch of holes to cheating.
Use machines in the counting process, after the voting is done. Keep them away from the actual place where people vote.
I have long thought the the best approach in many cases is to count a non-vote as a vote against all.
It won't work in some cases, however.
Those are blocks.
When you need a secret but verifiable ballot, on-line voting cannot provide either in a way that most voters can understand.
Not just hard problems. Not just NP Complete. We're trying to build systems based on internal contradictions here. You're trying to say that, with a little work, we can make a system where true equals false.
(It hardly takes any work at all to make a system that says true equals false. Different problem, however.)
I believe it will come. Today, when I go to vote (Canada), I present my proof of not yet having exercised my right). I am presented to a polling station (local gymn where there may be 20 such stations). Each of the parties is represented by an individual with a common list. They strike off my name, I am given a ballot, and shown the cubicle with the ballot box, screened from view and with only a pencil to mark an X appropriately. At end of day, the counts in the box cannot exceed the lines struck out by each invigilator. We have no reports of fraud or ballot box stuffing,
Electronically, I presume that at some time, I would not have to go to a polling station. Using a one-time code I would register online, vote, and that would be that. Its the parallel of what we would do on paper.
Who would run the servers? Why, the federal police, or army of course.
...that voting with paper is aaaaoouuut ?
They're not trying to fix the voting, they're trying to improve it. If (let's assume that it's 100% secure) they were to allow voting online, there'd be no reason that most people could not vote. Personally I think it'd be a great idea, again, assuming that's it's 100% secure
Never heard of spoofing, I guess. Maybe that's why you want to trust on-line voting.
Or maybe you want to be the spoofer?