Canada Considering Online Voting In Elections 324
ehud42 writes "Slashdot readers generally agree that voting machines such as those from Diebold are a bad idea. Well, what about online voting? That is what the Vancouver Sun is reporting. Given that voter turnout in our most recent election was the worst on record, Elections Canada is kicking around the idea of allowing voters to register online, update registration information online, and maybe even vote online."
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
...
Not a horrible idea... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think this could work, as long as they make it very VERY secure and accurate.
On the other hand, If you're too lazy to get off your butt and vote, I wouldn't mind it if your voice wasn't heard in my country. The problem isn't that its too hard to vote, its that people need to realize how important it is that they vote.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:3, Insightful)
.... security issues aside, I don't see how you could prevent vote buying once you take away the confidentiality of a person's vote.
Here's the thing... (Score:2, Insightful)
The kicker of all this electronic voting is that is easy. It really is, it's a damn simple problem to solve. Even online voting.
It's fucked up constantly by the processes we all abhor, and there should be a lesson in there for us. But electronic voting is actually a very simple problem to solve.
Secret Ballot is Essential (Score:5, Insightful)
Voting must be anonymous and private. If you allow online voting, then nothing prevents someone from standing over your shoulder and paying you $50 to vote the way he wants. Yes, absentee ballots have the same problem, which is why I think Oregon's all-mail voting system is terribly dangerous. This vulnerability isn't theoretical: the scenario I describe actually happened throughout the 19th century and led to some very crooked elections. It's why we switched to a secret ballot in the 1880s. Let's not forget our history here.
Re:Secret Ballot is Essential (Score:2, Insightful)
This vulnerability is already present now, as you said, with absentee ballots. Yet there has not been noticeable voter coercion or vote buying as a result. If someone really wanted to buy/bully a voter, why not buy/bully them into voting by mail? Wouldn't the same deterrents (whatever they may be) against mail voting crime also work against electronic voting crime?
Canada's Voter Turn Out Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Allowing people to vote online isn't going to solve the turnout problem as long as we have a federal election every couple of years. Canada has had something like four federal elections in the last five years, which is pretty ridiculous. The voters are tired of it, and they're demonstrating that by not bothering to vote. I'm not saying this is the best way to demonstrate disgust, but the ability to vote online isn't going to fix the real problem.
Problem is...can't validate the on-line votes (Score:2, Insightful)
Problem is the internet is worldwide medium. Accounts can be hacked or spoofed. Also the votes must be verified by hand. How are they gonna do that when it's all electronic with no paper trail?
It won't work. American public won't trust it and won't be for a very long time. Nothing is hacker-proof, I don't care how hard they tried to make it cracker-proof.. It won't happen.
Stupid, stupid, stupid idea (Score:5, Insightful)
1) easier for the apathetic (and likely uninformed) to vote?
2) easier to hack an election?
No good reason. It's just a stupid idea all around.
Re:Secret Ballot is Essential (Score:4, Insightful)
I think there's still some cultural inertia against this kind of vote manipulation, but the taboo against it will slowly weaken. I think we'll start seeing more of it in closely-contested races where it's easier to hide.
Party strategy wonks would have to be stupid not to consider the possibility, and considering that questionable tactics like gerrymandering and voter suppression are the norm today, I don't see why clandestine vote-buying might not be slowly added to the toolbox. Also, the problem isn't limited to vote-buying. What about a boss of a company requiring his employees vote a certain way? (Or for you conservative folk, what about a union boss doing the same thing?) What about a spouse demanding that his or her partner vote a certain way? As soon as you can verify a vote, you can coerce somebody else's vote.
And yes, vote manipulation is a problem with conventional absentee ballots: that's why, until recently, you had to provide a good reason to get an absentee ballot. Only recently have states started sending them out to anyone who asks. When you limit the total number of absentee ballots, you limit the total potential for fraud.
Even in states that do offer unrestricted absentee ballots, going to a polling place is still the cultural norm. That's why vote-by-mail is so dangerous: it substantially increases the total
number of votes vulnerable to this attack.
As another Canadian let me be the second to say (Score:5, Insightful)
Do not want.
Diebold concerns aside, online voting can be so severely tampered with that it's not even funny.
Concerns of forced voting come first to mind, i.e. someone coercing you into voting a certain way. But a lot of things can go wrong, specific to computer networking and technology itself:
* A Trojan horse can be planted on a system and activated soon after the voting period starts, calling the election servers and registering a vote on the owner's behalf. This would be subject to reverse-engineering the election process as it goes through on a real host with Wireshark, but feasible with good auto-update code on the Trojan horse.
* An intermediary host meddling with data. This can be a router, WiFi hotspot with hacked firmware, or even an ISP. Mitigated with the use of HTTPS, but users must not bypass warnings of bad certificates!
* (If the election is validated by name) Brute-forcing names and hoping to hit a Canadian citizen's name.
* (If the election is validated by GeoIP) Using a Canadian host as a proxy.
* Other countries' nationals could rig the election (see the comment below about 4chan rigging the election [slashdot.org]) if validation is not performed or performed incorrectly.
So, yeah. It might work. But it has to be foolproof as much as possible. Maybe send each citizen a card with an online access code? But the non-technological means of tampering with a person's vote will still apply, i.e. coercing them by one way or another, or even the lure of financial gain: "here, pay you 20 bucks to vote for Mr. X"... which is a way for the system to become corrupted.
So again: Do not want.
its happened before (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1894028,00.html [time.com]
Re:No way (Score:5, Insightful)
When voting online, someone could be standing over your shoulder making sure you are voting for who they want you to vote for.
Re:Stick em up! Your money or your candidate. (Score:5, Insightful)
For all this whining about Diebold, most people don't have a problem using Diebold's ATMs for banking.
You know immediately if your banking transaction worked. You know at the end of the month if it worked for someone else, and there are bank guarantees. (Why did you think all the ATMs have cams?)
All they can steal with from your bank is some of your money. Not your country.
If you seriously believe you have offered a good analogy I submit you are clueless about the problem at issue.
Re:Secret Ballot is Essential (Score:3, Insightful)
Some Counties in Washington State use All Mail voting.
Ballots mailed out. Sent back in un-numbered un-signed inner envelope which is inside of a bar coded and signed outer envelope. You mail it back in, or take it to ballot drop off places.
Its still a secret ballot. As secret as you want it to be. No one knows what you voted unless you let them stand there and watch.
Secrecy is always by choice.
An enforced secret ballot (in the voting booth) hasn't exactly forestalled vote buying, or tomb-stoning.
One of the chief reasons for secret ballot is to prevent voter intimidation, so your boss or union leader doesn't coerce you to vote for their candidate or risk losing your job. If ballot secrecy is optional, what's to stop your boss from insisting that you opt out of secrecy and vote his/her way?
Re:As a Canadian let me be the first to say (Score:5, Insightful)
DO NOT WANT
And as a Canadian let me say that the reason that "voter turnout in our most recent election was the worst on record" was because THE CANDIDATES SUCKED. I almost voted for the Communist just because I didn't know him and therefore didn't want to punch him in the face.
And then there's the fact that you have to vote for the party and not the person, so if I hate Harper but like the local Conservative I'm screwed. So, to cast a vote I feel good about, both the local guy and the party leader have to be good. Two good politicians? This never happens.
Online voting won't fix a bunch of broken parties, it'll just make tech-savvy people ignore online voting just like they ignore real voting. Let's face it, it's damn easy to vote. If you can be arsed to get to the polling site, that's the hardest part. After that it's having your name checked off and marking an X. If you catch it outside the rush it's faster than popping over to the 7-11 for a Big Gulp. Seriously, if people are too lazy or indifferent for that, then anything with a more complex authentication strategy than an online "BRING BACK CANCELLED SHOW X!" petition is going to be too much work too.
Re:Poorest Turnout...... (Score:3, Insightful)
This post contains one blatant falsehood and one technically true but extraordinarily misleading fact. The election was called because Parliament(not the government) was dissolved by the Governor General. However, all elections in Canada are called after Parliament is dissolved by the GG, so that was nothing new. The GG had zero choice in the matter anyway, as the GG is required by constitutional convention to follow the "advice" of the Prime Minister of Canada. It was the PM and the governing Conservatives who really called the election -- the GG dissolving Parliament is only a formality. To blame it on the opposition is ridiculous and has no basis whatsoever in fact.
Re:Problem is...can't validate the on-line votes (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that the story is about Canadian elections, who gives a fuck what the American public thinks?
Right, you didn't read the headline, never mind the summary, and god forbid reading the article.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)
Canadians hand count all votes before the nights end. We have preserved one of the cleanest examples of democratic election on the planet.
Sorry to break the news to everybody but online voting in one form or another is the future.
So logically Canada would be the perfect country to adopt online voting because we are small (population) and have done so well in the past. What better a voting system to do comparison to then the Canadian. If we can't pull it off well then.......
before you knee-jerk (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about how online tax returns are handled.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm quite Canadian myself, which is why I'm especially worried about this. You seem to be failing to grasp the simple fact online voting is fundamentally different from the current system, and has serious problems that are (at best) hard to fix, and no amount of shouting "CANADA FUCK YEAH" is going to make them go away.
Re:Here's the thing... (Score:3, Insightful)
The kicker of all this electronic voting is that is easy. It really is, it's a damn simple problem to solve. Even online voting.
It's fucked up constantly by the processes we all abhor, and there should be a lesson in there for us. But electronic voting is actually a very simple problem to solve.
Technically maybe. But voter coercion is a hard problem. You can't check remotely whether the vote was forced while you can easily control it in the voting booth.
Where is the paper trail? (Score:4, Insightful)
The silliness of the electronic voting machine -- and, also, online voting -- is that these contraptions are intended to (1) protect a voter from his own stupidity and (2) protect a voter from his own laziness. Frankly, why should we care if a voter is too stupid or too lazy to vote?
This entire electronic voting craze began after some voters in Florida could not follow simple instructions (on the voting ballot) in the American presidential election of 2000. Because they lacked the intelligence to follow simple instructions, they created ballots that were ambiguous.
These instructions are not rocket science. They are written so that a child in 8th grade can understand them. If a voter lacks even the intelligence to follow simple instructions, he likely lacks the intelligence to comprehend foreign policy and domestic policy. The loss of his vote is not a loss to democracy. An uninformed vote by an idiot would actually damage our democracy.
The other issue is the lazy voter. This online voting proposal mentioned by the "Vancouver Sun" is supposed to cater to him. Well, if a voter is too lazy to vote, then he is likely too lazy to make an effort to understand foreign policy and domestic policy. The loss of his vote is not a loss to democracy.
The bottom line is that paper ballots work just fine. We should continue to use them. Forget the electronic voting machines and online voting. They are far less safe and less reliable than mere paper ballots.
Let's keep the paper ballots.
Re:Votes can be coerced with guns. (Score:3, Insightful)
This internet voting would be absolutely fabulous! I could make sure that my wife votes correctly and not some socialist hippie party. I think we need this in Finland too!
Re:Voting Codes and the Secret Ballot (Score:5, Insightful)
But the problem may be manageable in countries that are sufficiently rich and have sufficiently strong democratic traditions.
I disagree. In practice the elections in Canada would not really be adversely affected by online voting provided reasonable precautions were in place now. But sooner or later we'll have our own Ahmadinejad ... or Bush v Gore ... and it'll explode in our faces.
Voting and elections in general are the fundamental expression of democracy, they should always be run low-tech, readily available to the public for scrutiny by the parties, and manual recount.
Remember, an election is essentially a peaceful overthrowing of the government, and the installation of a replacement. The governments role in the process should really be to facilitate the public conducting the election as at arms length as is practical.
Re:Votes can be coerced with guns. (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect the reality in a first world country is that you can't do this to the tune of enough votes without being far too obvious.
You're forgetting a few.. (Score:3, Insightful)
You're forgetting a few people that way:
- Disabled people or that need help in any way
- Those away on business
- Those living abroad
Leaving that aside, an online offering also has other implications from a logistics point of view. The gaming in the US election wasn't just based on Diebold kit that was taking simple mathematics to depths not even equalled by UK MPs on expenses, it was also in failing to supply enough machines to areas that happened to have an unsupporting audience, and the ones that were supplied just happened to malfunction a lot without any support to get them running again (I'm not telling you anything new here, it's all documented). Oh, and no human could possibly alter the outcome of the election [youtube.com] so you fix that too..
In summary, if you base a voting on online mechnisms, at least that part of the game is out of action.
However, as far as I know there is only one company in the whole world who has actually solved the electronic identity problem that you have with every single eGovernment idea: how do you prove the user is indeed who he/she says she is. That's a depressingly low count, but at least the company is Swiss which makes their idea less prone to "creative interference" from people in black suits with sunglasses..
Re:We already have a proven online model (Score:3, Insightful)
Banking and voting are fundamentally different. With banking, both you and your bank keep separate records of all transactions, and you can do a balance at the end of the month if you suspect something. You can be absolutely sure at the end of the month that the bank is playing fairly with your money. With voting, the system cannot retain a link between the voter and the vote after it has been cast. Therefore, there's no way for an individual to be sure that their vote was counted. The only way to feel secure is for the system to be transparent. Nothing could be less transparent than an online voting system. There's too much crud in the technology stack to for you to be certain that what you saw on your screen is really what was recorded at the other end.
Re:before you knee-jerk (Score:4, Insightful)
This analogy is incorrect for the same reason that the analogy between online banking and voting is invalid. With banking, both you and your bank maintain a separate record of transactions, and you can be certain at the end of the month whether the bank has the same record of transactions as you. This is because the bank (and the tax department) actually maintain a link between you and your account. However, a voting system simply cannot maintain a link between the voter and vote cast. Therefore, there's no way for a voter to be sure that their vote was counted, unless they fundamentally trust the system as a whole. The only way for people to trust the system is for it to be transparent, and online voting is about the least transparent system I can think of. There are too many things in the technology stack between your screen and the server for you to be sure that the vote is recorded the way you think it is.
Re:Secret Ballot is Essential (Score:4, Insightful)
> An enforced secret ballot (in the voting booth) hasn't exactly forestalled vote buying, or tomb-stoning.
If the secret ballot isn't enforced it is almost useless as a protection. And voting in person in a booth can in theory prevent both problems whether mechanical or paper votes are cast. Online voting is an open invitation to both problems exploding into major problems because the fraud isn't even possible to stop in theory.
Work it through. If non-secret voting isn't considered the normal way of voting anyone opting to vote in secret has something to hide. And as long as large numbers aren't voting in secret there are large numbers of votes available for purchase.
The problems with our current system are solvable.
1. Make absentee voting rare enough that it won't be likely to be abusable by making the process more difficult.
2. Get serious about checking photo ID and purging the registration rolls by cross linking databases to get rid of duplicate registrations and dead people.
As for low turnout I don't see a problem. For years I have held the position that if you aren't willing to invest the time to be up to speed on the basic issues and candidates the best service you can render the Republic is to stay the hell out of a voting booth.