Canada To Adopt On-Line Voting? 405
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?"
Having worked on the software (Score:2, Insightful)
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!
On-line voting is not secret (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ack! (Score:4, Insightful)
Malicious code is the least of the problems with online voting.
Even though there are more obvious problems, I believe that the freedom to study and test the system is essential to any democratic voting system.
Re:Sometimes luddites are right (Score:5, Insightful)
Accuracy not speed for my elections please. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ack! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, no. It's pretty trivial to design a paper ballot system so that it's both fast to count and easy to monitor.
Open the voting place to public. Bring in the ballot box, open it, show that there's nothing inside, and seal it. Commence the voting. After voting ends, count the votes right there, in the voting place, in full view of everyone who wishes to watch - and, since this is the New Tens, also videotape it and upload the tape as well as the numbers. Next, tell the numbers to the regional center, which adds all the subtotals to get its own, again in full view of everyone and with the numbers uploaded on the Internet. Continue with as many layers of the hierarchy as needed, and you should get the final results overnight, and there is no part of this process which couldn't be watched over by anyone who wants.
Contrast this with computers, where it's just plain impossible to know what they're doing unless you already trust them, there are numerous examples of bugs going unnoticed in security-critical code for years, and actual real-life voting machines making complete mockery of security. Not to mention there's a huge incentive to hack them.
Re:Ack! (Score:5, Insightful)
That is presuming that a legitimate person is trying to access the legitimate site and perform the voting in a straightforward manner with good intent only voting once per election. There are so many other factors involved where identity can't be proven or other aspects that to me it boggles the mind that anybody would even consider on-line voting for anything critical.
Re:Paper ballots elected Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
Canada does not use fancy mechanical systems with chads. Voters are provided with pencils and put marks in a circle. It's simple and effective, and Canada gets voting results far faster than the US (and before you cite population size differences, the Elections Canada model would take the same amount of time even if you had 10x as many ridings). It's one single system and organization that handles federal voting for the entire country.
Since the CBC moderators won't accept my comment (Score:5, Insightful)
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.