Paper Vote Canada

In my understanding, Australia does a review of election processes and possible improvements after every election.

Canada should be so lucky as to have a process as comprehensive as Australia's last review in 2013, where "The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters held 20 hearings and reviewed more than 200 submissions, before deciding Australia should stick to its largely paper based system."[1]

The foreward of this Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) report is worth quoting extensively, as it is clear and compelling.  Any emphasis (bolding) below is mine.

advocates argue that [electronic voting computers and Internet voting] offer faster and potentially more accurate results. With the close of polls the results are known within minutes rather than hours, days and weeks and arguably without the human error that occurs in the long paper ballot count.

Many think it sounds like a good idea for the next federal election.

No matter your view, this is not feasible.

Even the most ardent electronic voting advocates must recognise that in logistical terms it would be impossible for our electoral authorities to roll it out next polling day which is less than two years away – at the latest.

But what about future elections?

I once simply assumed so, but that was before I had really given it a lot of thought.

After hearing from a range of experts, and surveying the international electoral landscapes it is clear to me that Australia is not in a position to introduce any large-scale system of electronic voting in the near future without catastrophically compromising our electoral integrity.

Machine electronic voting at a polling place is vulnerable to hacking to some degree. This can be mitigated by a system that not only records your vote electronically, but also produces a printed ballot for physical counting and later verification. In other words, a lot of expense to still visit the polling booth, queue up and complete your vote on a machine rather than a paper ballot.

For this reason, internet voting seems to be naturally the most attractive to many voters. As an election expert from the USA recently said to me: ‘when it comes to voting, folks would rather be online than in line.’

But the weight of evidence tells us that at present [Internet voting] is highly vulnerable to hacking. While internet voting occurs in Estonia, it does not mean that system cannot be hacked.

With all the internet security architecture available, the academic experts swear they can, and have proved they can, hack such systems.

...

Given we complete so many transactions online, I am often asked why voting should be any different. My answer to that is that voting once every three years to determine our democratic destiny is not an everyday transaction.

Not only do we have the right to a ballot; we have rightly enshrined within our system the right to a secret vote. Voting at a booth in a polling place guarantees this; voting over the internet threatens this.

Internet voting would expose some voters to family and peer pressure by removing the individual isolation of voting at a secluded booth and replacing it with voting in a home, a workplace or a public place. It also potentially opens up a market for votes where disengaged or financially desperate voters could be offered money to vote a certain way, which could be verified in a way not possible at a polling place.

...

Over the course of the twenty hearings to date and in reviewing the 207 submissions received, the Committee has worked collaboratively and in an impartial manner to ensure that the best outcomes have been met.

Technology is moving at a rapid pace. The Committee believes that we should be utilising it to ensure that the systems underpinning how we vote are sound and that persons with disabilities have easy access to the vote. In doing so, we will harness [technology] which enhances our electoral integrity, not that which endangers it.

I extend my thanks once again to the Honourable Tony Smith for such a clear and compelling summary of the evidence.

[1] ABC - Curious Campaign: Why have voters not had access to electronic voting? - 26 May 2016

Labels: australia, electronic voting, internet voting, online voting, report

Another inquiry into electronic voting (which in Australia seems to include Internet voting), this time in the state of Victoria.

Submissions

The Committee is currently calling for submissions - please see the Submissions and eSubmissions pages for more information.

Public Hearings

The Committee intends to conduct public hearings at 55 St Andrews Place, East Melbourne on Monday 22 August and Wednesday 24 August, 2016.  See the Hearings and Transcripts page for more details as they become available. 

Mailing list

If you are interested in receiving updates on the progress of the Inquiry, email news@parliament.vic.gov.au, and request Electronic Voting inquiry updates. To receive all news alerts from the Parliament of Victoria, including news alerts for all parliamentary committee inquiries, email news@parliament.vic.gov.au and ask for ‘all news alerts’.

above from http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/emc/inquiry/419

Twitter: @VicParliament and @VicGovAu

It is a bit frustrating to see these endless inquiries.  The Parliament of Australia (which is different from the Parliament of Victoria) held an extensive consultation in 2013.  To quote a valid part of an otherwise misguided article in The Australian, the Parliament of Australia inquiry "held 20 hearings and reviewed more than 200 submissions before deciding ­Australia should stick to its largely paper-based system".

Please stop asking the same question about Internet voting hoping to get a different answer.

The Australian Parliament inquiry is excellent, incidentally.

Parliament of Australia -  Inquiry into and report on all aspects of the conduct of the 2013 Federal Election and matters related thereto -

Second interim report on the inquiry into the conduct of the 2013 federal election: An assessment of electronic voting options

Labels: australia, consultation, electronic voting, internet voting, online voting, Parliament of Victoria, Victoria

Here is the comment I posted on The Australian article Election cliffhanger prompts e-Voting rethink by Supratim Adhikari on July 5, 2016.  The comment has not (yet?) been accepted.

COMMENT

While the counting of paper ballots is slow, all of the complexity is visible to everyone.  With an Internet voting system, you would be greatly increasing the complexity and all of the associated possibilities for very complex systems to fail, but hiding all of that increased complexity from voters.  This simply distances the voting system even further from citizens.  To quote the 2013 Parliamentary inquiry: “It is important that in embracing technology, the secret ballot is not undermined, voter behaviour is not negatively impacted, and confidence in the electoral process and electoral outcomes is not damaged. At a time of debate about community disengagement with political processes, it would be greatly concerning if the method of voting—the one act of participatory democracy that all Australian citizens will definitely engage in—was to further disengage the community from these processes.” [1]

That is not to mention the risk of the election being hacked, including by other nation states.  This is a reality already - China was blamed for a massive hack on a Bureau of Meterology computer [2] resulting in the government spending an additional $230 million on cybersecurity [3] .

This leads to the last point, about claimed cost savings.  The current paper-based system can be used again and again, year after year, with at most minor modifications.  That is not at all the case for any kind of universal electronic voting system.  Technology and cyberattacks are constantly changing, which means that any electronic voting system is obsolete the day that it launches.  Such a system would have to be continuously and expensively updated for every election, to reflect technology changes and to defend against new types of attacks.  That kind of continuous expenditure on information technology is great for the Information Industry, but terrible for government budgets.

[1] http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Electoral_Matters/2013_General_Election/Second_Interim_Report/Chapter_4#comment section 4.80
[2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-02/china-blamed-for-cyber-attack-on-bureau-of-meteorology/6993278
[3] http://phys.org/news/2016-04-australia-hack-boosts-cyber.html

ENDCOMMENT

With the slow paper-based count, there has been a flood of articles about Australian e-voting.  Unfortunately I'm not able to respond to them all, but the above comment applies generally.

Labels: australia, comment, electronic voting, internet voting, newspaper comment, online voting

I have to provide a response to this article because it puts forth remarkably weak arguments.

there are the “experts” who claim that we shouldn’t implement electronic voting

Ok, here's the thing: when people are actual experts, you don't put "experts" in quotes. Dr. Vanessa Teague, one of the experts referred to, has written extensively about the topic, including peer-reviewed papers about voting systems and computer security. One can see that from her University of Melbourne faculty page and her Google Scholar profile. To dismiss someone whom Google Scholar reports as having been cited 1064 times by other academics as an "expert" is at best completely misleading.

This style continues in this muddle of a paragraph

All of these things “might” be true but they don’t “necessarily” have to be true and don’t in the end serve as justification for not implementing electronic voting.

I really don't know what to say.  The statements made by experts are evidence that can be challenged by doing tests.  That's science.  Putting things in quotes to disparage them is not.

And then we get to the latest bit of technology magic, Blockchain

Blockchain-based voting has the benefit that voting can be done online anonymously

Really.  Anonymously.  The Blockchain public ledger, in which every transaction has a user ID attached, enables anonymous voting?  How does it do that exactly?  How does one ensure that only eligible voters vote, and that the vote that they cast (presumably by posting the vote to the Blockchain) is both verifiable and anonymous, when the user ID must be traceable?

The reality of a vote using the Blockchain is you're posting a traceable vote to a public ledger, which is to say, you're undermining anonymity and enabling coercion.

But Blockchain is in any case the kind of sleight of hand distraction a magician would perform, to distract you from other key activities.  In system security, you must ensure that every component of the system is secure, not just one component.  Even if Blockchain were somehow a magic crypto solution for storing and checking the vote (which it isn't) you still have to cast the vote.  From an actual computer in the real world, not a theoretical computer.  And actual computers in the real world, whether they be desktops or mobile devices, are hacked and compromised all the time.  In fact the exact same author who just wrote the above quote about Blockchain-based voting's benefits wrote in the article just previous to the voting one that even antivirus security companies can't get security right.

Antivirus software is very complicated. It has to understand the nature of a very large number of different types of files and the different ways in which these files can be altered to escape detection. In order to efficiently process files that may be being written to a disk or arriving via a web link or email, antivirus software usually runs on the computer with extra privileges. This makes the consequence of attacks on this type of software particularly serious. The counter-intuitive result of this is that antivirus software gives malware writers even greater opportunities for attack on a computer than if the software hadn’t been installed in the first place. In security jargon, it actually increases the “attack surface”.

That is exactly correct. But if you think antivirus software is very complicated, Internet voting software is vastly more complicated than that.  You've got the entire attack surface of the client computer used to cast the votes, and the entire attack surface of the network used to transmit the votes, and the entire attack surface of the servers used to store and count the votes (including Blockchain, which doesn't run on some abstract cloud, but on actual servers or desktops that can be compromised in many ways, including simply capturing enough mining computers to outvote any other writes to the chain).

Recording votes on the blockchain could be combined with two-factor authentication such as that employed by a system used in Utah recently. This system allowed online voting for the Republican Party’s presidential nominee during the recent US primaries.

Like the system used in Utah?  The one The Guardian reports was "plagued by glitches" where "as many as 13,000 people had tried to sign up but could not because of a variety of technical problems" and "The state party disregarded warnings from prominent computer scientists and from the National Institute for Standards and Technology, which oversees federal certification of voting equipment, that online voting systems are dangerously vulnerable to malware, putting both the integrity and the secrecy of the vote at risk."  That system is the one you want to hold up as a model?

I don't know how one can reconcile understanding not increasing attack surface in one article with advocating vastly increasing attack surface in the following one; I'm going to assume it is associated with frustration with what is admittedly a very complex and slow paper-based election process in Australia.

If you want to read some actual thoughtful analysis of online voting in Australia, in addition to Dr. Teague's article and extensive submissions on the topic, I also recommend that there be an extensive examination of the risks and benefits associated with electronic voting in Australia.  Oh wait, there already was, by the Australian Parliament in 2013, and they concluded that the benefits don't outweigh the risks.  It's an excellent, comprehensive, clear report.  And it only puts things in quotes when it is actually quoting people and statements.

Parliament of Australia -  Inquiry into and report on all aspects of the conduct of the 2013 Federal Election and matters related thereto -

Second interim report on the inquiry into the conduct of the 2013 federal election: An assessment of electronic voting options

Labels: australia, e-voting, electronic voting, internet voting, online voting