Slashdot Mirror
Norway Scraps Online Voting
An anonymous reader sends news that Norway will no longer experiment with online voting:
[T]he trials have ended because, said the government, voters' fears about their votes becoming public could undermine democratic processes. Political controversy and the fact that the trials did not boost turnout also led to the experiment ending. In a statement, Norway's Office of Modernisation said it was ending the experiments following discussions in the nation's parliament about efforts to update voting systems. The statement said although there was "broad political desire" to let people vote via the net, the poor results from the last two experiments had convinced the government to stop spending money on more trials. ... A report looking into the success of the 2013 trial said about 70,000 Norwegians took the chance to cast an e-vote. This represented about 38% of all the 250,000 people across 12 towns and cities who were eligible to vote online. However, it said, there was no evidence that the trial led to a rise in the overall number of people voting nor that it mobilised new groups, such as young people, to vote.
What logic is this? We found that although nearly a third of mathematicians used electronic calculators when they were invented, the electronic calculators did not encourage previously non-mathematicians to be mathematicians, so we threw them all away.
So, given a reasonably small country with a population relatively well concentrated into population centres and good connectivity, turnout for voting does not seem to be strongly limited by access to polls.... yes, well, perhaps the solution is not addressing the real problem ?
I'm surprised there isn't more concern about the serious and fundamental problems with online voting.
That blog post makes two points, one about vote selling and one about security. I don't see how any online voting system could ever stop you from being able to sell your vote, and that was one of the major reasons for a secret ballot. That pretty much makes online-voting a non-starter right there.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
My guess is you might be thinking of a Baltic state: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Norway never had general online voting. Less than 10% of the population were part of the tests.
If you aren't going to vote, then making voting available electronically (whether over the internet, or via digital voting booths) isn't going to suddenly change you into a voter. People don't vote because they are disenfranchised or disillusioned with the political system. FIX your political system, and more people will vote.
Or do what Australia does, and actually fine people who don't vote (although frankly, I'd rather you abstain, than vote without being educated about who you are voting for). http://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/voting_australia.htm
And for those in the US, get the massive money OUT of politics, and your system will self-correct.
Why mod down? Kenya is where the giraffes are. And the zebra.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I bet you they could have improved voter turnout if they had introduced a negative vote button, like the "Thumbs Down" button on youtube. Sometimes you just don't know who to vote for, but would be glad to use your vote as a form of protest, and to send a well-deserved message to some cretinous politician or political party.
and a high tech voting fiasco.
On-line voting has proven to have no benefit. By-mail voting on the other hand has proven to be completely negative. It greatly enhances the ability for the unscrupulous to cast fraudulent votes (example, people following the mail truck to collect ballots to vote and send in their own way), to ignore votes from voters they don't like (my 2004 ballot was found in a box under a table four years later), or to identify how particular voters are voting (just check the envelop on the way in). Every thing the Norwegian voters feared happening has happened here in Washington. Also, with mail in voting there are no id's so there is no need to be a citizen or eligible to vote or even be alive and breathing. Sure, they say that is taken care of by checking the signatures on the outside of the envelopes, but that is done months after the election and with no way of pulling a ballot even if they did find a problem, and when the signature doesn't match, all that happens is they send a letter and ask if you want to give them a new signature. Ignore it and nothing happens. Yes, our civil rights are being violated by not being allowed to vote in a free and fair election. Thank goodness the Norwegian government was able to recognize the issues and take action to do something about it. Here, they just smile and pretend everything is all hunky-dory.
You seem to have thought wrong. All the criticism I've seen is Europeans asking why the US finds it necessary to invest in mechanical ("hanging chads") and electronic ("whoops it voted for the other guy", "whoops we got hacked") voting machines when we're doing just fine with pencil, paper and humans counting. Europe (The EU27) just had European elections where the entire ballot was almost entirely done with people scratching graphite onto dried wood pulp. Somehow, we managed.
No matter how easy you make something, Lazy people will still be lazy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Over a decade ago, there was a GNU project for internet voting. With no financial incentive, the driving force was a belief that there would be a benefit in making voting easier. The project was abandoned after they realized how difficult creating a secure, reliable and anonymous internet voting system actually is.
The founder of the project quotes Bruce Schneier as saying, "a secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers."
Of course, if someone here wants to show their credentials and explain why Schneier is wrong, I'm sure many of us would love to hear their reasoning.
The big problem, IMHO, with this sort of thing, and mail in votes, is that when voting takes place outside an observed voting booth, you can't guarantee an anonymous vote. You run the risk of your favorite group of goons showing up at someone's home to 'help' them vote 'correctly' and hold them accountable for doing so - i.e threaten them. If I have to vote where nobody can see me mark my ballot, it's harder to threaten me (or bribe me) for my vote.
Maybe they just decided that since the election result didnt please the ruling party, it was safer to scrap the system?
If they wanted to increase the turnout a certain method would be to make voting mandatory as is done in Belgium.
Belgium reglarly enjoys voter turnout in the 90% range (http://www.idea.int/vt/countryview.cfm?id=21)
Too bad Belgium also happens to be the country with worst record for forming a government. I think they came close to 600 days without actual government in place..but that's more related to having two distinct national groups that dont like one-another too much, rather than having mandatory elections.
Oh by the way, in Estonia e-voting is a regular thing now with 4 elections successfully completed since 2005, the latest one 2014 EU parliament elections (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia). The opposition who's electorate is mainly voting on paper crys wolf on security every chance they get but so far a successful proven attack on e-voting has yet to take place...
Give the state of today's technology, no form of electronic voting can be considered reasonably safe, accurate or secure.
It may be easy to find fault with their reasoning, but its hard to criticize the outcome.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Thank you - this is a key, often overlooked aspect. I find E-voting on regular elections to really be more of a "pilot stage" on the road to true democracy. Or, what I think is an important difference, toward true representative (liquid) direct democracy, wherein you can choose someone (or multiple people, for different types of issues) to vote for you (and they can forward delegate the votes onward if they choose), and you can change / override them at will. A delegate could be some estimeed professor of constitutional law, they could be be the head of some NGO that you support, it could be your cousin Chris who "tends to follow this stuff and seems to make sense when he talks about it", whoever you want.
The problem if you don't allow representatives of any kind then on low-turnout issues (some of which will be *very* low turnout), pressure groups can have undue influence. For example, if 90% of a town's residents are environmentally conscious but there's some obscure zoning bill that would allow a sensitive area to be turned into a chemical plant down the road, and the company called on all its employees to get out and vote for it, even though they only make up a tiny percentage of the population, they still stand a chance of getting the bill through because most people don't follow every little issue that comes up for a vote. By allowing for delegates, you never face this situation. But if someone feels betrayed by their representative, or goes through a political philolosophy change, or whatever, they can swap them out immediately, or override them on a particular issue.
And I've heard people complain about direct democracy saying that it's "mob rule" and would have negative views on minority rights. But *all* democracy has that problem. Which is why you don't leave the job of safeguarding rights to the public, you leave that to the courts. The court system is the balance to the tyrrany of the majority, and needs to be maintained as such.
I was watching this thing on TV about some guy named Hitler. Someone should stop him!
You're wrong.
In Norway, the standard system is that you get into a private voting booth, which is stocked with ballots for different parties. You may if you wish rearrange this ballot (cross out candidates etc. using a normal pen), before you put the ballot in a closed envelope. You take this envelope, together with an ID, to the ballot box, show the ID and get crossed off the list, and put the envelope in the ballot box.
It is also possible to cast the vote a few weeks earlier at some locations (local government offices, universities, embassies/consulates etc.), basically using the same system except that the protocol (the list which you are crossed off from) is electronic.
Finally it is possible to mail in a ballot (you need not use the official forms, it is acceptable to write the name of your favourite party on a sheet of paper) if you are living abroad, but the process is somewhat complicated. This probably corresponds closest to the electronic system.
Obviously, politicians want to make voting easier so that more people vote carelessly or without thinking ahead. "He promised me free better healthcare with more doctors and less cost without creating a government run bureaucratic nightmare while maintaining all the things of our current system with no transitional pain. So I best get online and vote." Politicians want people who are too busy to go vote or too dumb to vote informed at all. I don't have 3-4 hours every 5-10 years to go get a government issued photo identification or maybe I can't bother to plan ahead enough to get that done ahead of an election, but let me vote anyway, I just heard the election was today. But don't worry when I vote I do so because I have researched the issues and politicians thoroughly. Oh, wait these types of voter tend to elect people who are awaiting trail in jail but who win because they where first place on the ticket.
No what we should want are people who take the time to research what and who they are voting for and who have enough conviction in their beliefs to overcome little hardships like waiting in lines and getting a reasonable distance to a polling place if they are able bodied. Also, they need to be able to follow basic directions like remove hanging chads, filling out circles, etc. Why because if they can't or don't want to put the effort in how can we trust they could evaluate the issues and people in the election. If we made it even harder to vote we would probably see the end of both the reps and dems at least in their current form. and probably several third parts springing up. While I love some of the idea of having basic competence testing for voters, I wouldn't trust our current or future politicians with that power.
IN closing "If you can't do basics simple grade school tasks, you probably can't be trusted to govern yourself."
This is the biggest hurdle local and state governments need to overcome. If you have to spend marginally more to give better customer service, DO IT! In the long run, the process will be refined, run cheaper and better and more people will migrate to the service. It's all in the marketing, which they failed to do. I work in the elections business and voting by mail used to be a controversial subject. A little marketing, education and refinement and 5 years later over 30% of the voters in our jurisdiction use it. Electronic kiosk voting, well that's another matter. Given a publicly available, transparent, open sourced internet voting system, the right marketing and deployment strategy would make it a viable replacement for mail ballots. Given a network connected polling place, you would have a comprehensive solution to replace the broken electronic voting machine model. Some one has to stick their foot in the turd and start the process. It must be open, it must be transparent and it must be free. The public has to own the voting technology, there is no other verifiable way.
I live in Norway, i never heard of this before. no wonder their turnout was so bad when they didnt tell people about it.
I'd recommend https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... based voting
Casteism