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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.
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.
"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
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
So would I. I always wanted to decide who gets to rule, and online voting should offer the perfect chance for that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oh that's from the distant past where they were worried that those poor voters in BC would just fall all over themselves to support whoever people in Ontario voted for if they only they knew who that was. It's a law from before daily tracking polls or the Internet (or even timeshifted TV channels from other regions). Today it's archaic. Threatening jail time for talking about Election Results on Twitter (where there was an active group of people like me circumventing the law with the help of friendly foreigners) is so absurd that even trying to enforce it just brings the law into disrepute.
They try to justify it by saying that people in BC will still be influenced by knowing who Ontario voted for, while ignoring the fact that the gap in poll closing times is so short that very few people are even affected. That number is greater in the Atlantic provinces, but those are so small that nobody really cares who they voted for anyway.
-- "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?
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?)
Right. I mean, what can possibly go wrong? Every online voting I've ever seen has been 100% accurate with nobody ever voting more than once.
I saw an online vote for who people preferred as a Republican candidate and Ron Paul got like THREE TIMES more votes than anyone else, so I guess once we have online voting we will live in a libertarian paradise.
Personally, I can't wait. I'm sharpening my knives already.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
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
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
There's plenty of research papers been published on "secure online voting". Try google.
In theory it can be much more secure than paper.
(Though in practice it's likely they'll sub-contract it to a bunch of idiots who don't know how to google those research papers...)
No sig today...
'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)
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.
That number is greater in the Atlantic provinces, but those are so small that nobody really cares who they voted for anyway.
You can stop wondering why no one in Canada likes people from Ontario. Your whole post, especially the last statement, make it painfully obvious. You managed to not only offend people from both coasts you left out all the provinces between Ontario and BC as well as Quebec and the northern provinces and territories. Ontario doesn't make up the whole country.
Don't forget each major party gets $2 per vote. Independents and small parties get nothing. That in itself if a reason not to vote. I vote in local elections, federal elections no way. They can get there $2 dollars somewhere else. It is wrong for the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP to be raking in money for every vote they get so they can run bigger, better campaigns against the less wealthy candidates.
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.
Wouldn't be easier to make the people in the Atlantic provinces vote earlier and the people next to the Pacific vote later? IIRC the difference is 4 or 5 hours, but just three hours will suffice.
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
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.
"40% of the vote" actually makes them look pretty popular. The fact is that only 24% of eligible voters voted for them, yet now they have an absolute majority.
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
The last election cost $288.2million. That's about $8 per Canadian.
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.
So if you vote for an independent small party, which major party gets the $2 for your vote?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
How can voting be secure if it is not performed in a secure location?
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.
The premise behind the banning of early results is that voters who see the early results BEFORE they vote may be influenced by those early results. To say this anoher way, banning early publication is an attempt to place all voters on the same level playing field as they vote: that is, everyone uses the same information from which to decide who to vote for.
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.
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?
Last time someone at the federal government came with a 200 million dollars idea, we ended up paying over 2 billion dollars for a still flawn system (firearms register if you haven't identify yet what I am talking about). I don't trust any cost estimates for such a system coming from the government, neither from the industry. Sorry, we were screwed once. Keep everything on paper please, 288 million dollars is not too expensive to make sure the elected government is the right one, it would sure cost much more to have the wrong one elected.
Achille Talon
Hop!
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.
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 ?
Yeah, not really.
It's not that people in BC would vote like Ontario does, it's that Ontario has a huge influence in federal elections. If you're watching returns and see that party X has basically won already, when you're in favour of party Y, then a lot of people just won't bother voting for Y because it makes no difference.
As a practical matter, this is big because Canada ties public funding of parties to popular vote share in federal elections: If your party wins 12% of the vote, you get 12% of the pie when the public money comes out. Depressing turnout for losing candidates in western provinces serves to cut money from them in the next election, creating lock-in for the party that wins Ontario.
It's a law from before daily tracking polls or the Internet (or even timeshifted TV channels from other regions).
I note that in the most recent federal election, polling was not any kind of a sufficient guide to who would win what. We have a 'first past the post system': how accurate polling translates to actual seat counts is quite difficult, and certainly not a useful guide to voters.
Seriously, it's not a huge burden to not see results until all the polls close.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Exactly. This would be a prime target for a computer virus. Politics is very high stakes. Especially deciding who runs a country. With the number of viruses present on the average person's computer, I wouldn't trust it for voting. Maybe an iPhone App though (joking, but it would probably be more secure).
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
And then I could check your vote, see you voted for the traitor, then send goons after your ass. That's why the vote has to be anonymous.
In theory, a "free market economy" is good for people.
We don't live "in theory".
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.)
Voting out of spite kind of defeats the point, doesn’t it?
Huh? If you don't want a big party to get the $2, it's obviously because you don't like those parties. So either you don't like any party, then that by itself is is reason not to vote, so no reason to invoke the $2 rule, or you prefer one of the other parties, in which case there's no reason not to vote for it, again no reason to invoke the $2 rule.
In short, not voting due to the $2 rule is IMHO a bad decision.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
...that voting with paper is aaaaoouuut ?
Is it actually an improvement to enable people to vote much more easily? Granted, there are a few small groups (people who live in very remote areas, military, etc.) who may find it difficult to vote, but it isn't that hard for most people. If people can't even take the small amount of trouble it takes to vote now, do they really know enough and care enough to vote intelligently? It's one thing for everyone to have the right to vote, but it seems like an open question whether it is an advantage to society to make it easier than it is now.
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?