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Missing The Point About Online Voting In Canada
from the if-no-one's-worried-about-security,-it's-not-a-problem dept
Coming just a week after a report harshly criticized plans for internet-based voting in the US, Canadians are saying that we should just calm down about it. Looking at their results from an election that offered internet voting, they seem to think everything is wonderful when you vote online. Their proof? They got plenty more people than expected to vote, including many who said they'd never voted before. To be sure, that's great news. However, it completely misses the point. The problem with internet voting, as explained in the study, is that it's simply not secure - and the potential that it can be tampered with is too great to just ignore. The Canadians completely brush this off by quoting a study they did saying that the voters who didn't vote online weren't avoiding it due to security. It's a little scary how much this misses the point. The point isn't whether or not people will use it because of security concerns - but whether or not those security risks are real. Who really cares whether or not the voters are concerned about security? The people tasked with guaranteeing the election's integrity are the ones who need to be concerned about the security of the system.
Reader Comments
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Paranoid?
Aren't you being a bit paranoid Mike? The new voters may _really_ be named Perl.
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Two Votes
My wife never votes, but with Internet voting I could vote for her. That's right, I get 2 votes.
It doesn't matter how secure Internet voting is, the issue for me is that they won't know who is actually voting.
Someone could go to the nursing home or homeless shelter, sign up everyone as an Internet voter, and then place all of their votes in the election.
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move voters or just more votes?
Their proof? They got plenty more people than expected to vote...
Well, maybe. Or maybe the extra votes were rigged and didn't actually correspond to real voters.
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Marketing Company + Reporter does not equal all Ca
It may be petty to point this about, but as a Canadian I do feel as if my entire country has just been tarred with the stupid brush. The article mentioned is the opinion of one gung-ho reporter about a study published by a marketing firm that said "yay, on-line voting works." Of course, they were hired to make sure that it did work, so barring a complete failure it stands to reason they would report that everything went swimmingly. Kinda hurts the bottom line if they say they failed.
The points made by Mike are valid - the study and article do gloss over the whole security issue - but it's not like it's a report from the government saying that all of Canada will use the system to elect the next Prime Minister, even if some people say it isn't safe. Oh wait, that's the Americans.
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on-line voting should be available.
Since the voter turn out is very low (checking the stats) ... why cant Canada to be the first to allow on-line voting? ... everyone leads very active lives, and having voting only on a specifac day/time. It's hard for people to arrange to get to and find the poling station. ... with having an on-line varification (entering in a passcode on the paper mailout stip) and ID information, should be enough. I'm sure the voter turnout will be better if an on-line opion was available. ... Concerned about Internet security? Ha! Most everything is now available on-line, and if not, it will be soon.
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