Paper Vote Canada

I'm going to assume that this is just an unfortunate misunderstanding about terminology and mandate.

Online voting means voting over the Internet.  You cast your vote from your home computer or smartphone.

Electronic voting means voting on a voting machine (a voting computer) at a polling place.

Electronic vote counting means vote tabulators of various sorts, most commonly optical mark-sense readers that count votes by scanning marked paper ballots.

Recommendations for Consultation

0. Discontinue discussion of electronic voting

However, if discussion of electronic voting is going to continue:

1. The mandate for the Electoral Reform committee should be amended, adding after the words "online voting" the following: ", and electronic voting.
   But it is probably too late to do that.
2. There should be clear definitions of electronic voting and online voting in the Host a Canadian federal electoral reform dialogue in your community materials and those definitions should also be provided to the committee.
3. The focus of the electoral reform dialogue should be placed on online voting to respect the original committee mandate.
4. The Library of Parliament Background Paper 2016-06 on Electoral Systems should have a section on electronic voting added.
5. The Electoral Reform committee online survey should have questions about electronic voting added, and the consequences of currently-completed surveys only having questions about online voting will have to be considered.
6. In future, more care must be taken with terminology used and alignment between committee activities and consultation materials.

Recommendations for Individuals

If you're concerned about Canada using electronic voting machines or online voting in national elections, please participate in the consultation (deadline October 7, 2016) and make your opinion heard.

Background

The terms of reference for the Special Committee on Electoral Reform very clearly say only online voting.  There is no mention of electronic voting.

Here's Vote 79



and Vote 80


That's the mandate discussed in Parliament.

The town hall material and discussion has proceeded to talk about electronic voting. Without an adequate backgrounder. Without even a definition. So we may get reporting back about some jumbled up mix of voting machines and online voting, while the committee itself has only discussed online voting.

And electronic voting is a VERY DIFFERENT DISCUSSION than just online voting, with very different considerations.

I will now have to write a separate briefing about electronic voting machine risks.

Anyway, here's some of the town hall materials in order to demonstrate that electronic voting is being discussed.

Potential Canadian federal electoral reform event dialogue topics and questions


So it is clear that the terminology electronic voting and online voting are not being used interchangeably, they are mentioned separately; this is not just confusing one term for the other.

Electronic voting and online voting both link to this text below about "introducing new technologies at the polls", which again has no Parliamentary mandate that I can see, other than a chain of assumptions about how using voting machines could lead to using online voting.  There is no definition of either electronic voting or online voting provided.

Changing Canada’s federal electoral system


In addition, the only thing that is even close to a briefing, the Library of Parliament Background Paper 2016-06-E on Electoral Systems, which is already weak on online voting, has no section about electronic voting at all (presumably because it's not in the committee mandate).

And the committee survey also doesn't ask any questions about electronic voting.

Some of the dialogue guidance even focuses on electronic voting alone, without mentioning online voting.

Sample Canadian federal electoral reform event agenda and facilitator guide


And there are at the time of this writing five variations of the Canadian Democracy tweet below, asking about electronic voting; I assume at least one tweet per town hall meeting.

"Electronic and Online voting?  Good idea? Bad idea? #EngagedinER" - @CdnDemocracy - 10:56 PM - 9 Sep 2016

Electronic and Online voting? Good idea? Bad idea? #EngagedinER

— Canadian Democracy (@CdnDemocracy) September 10, 2016

So to sum up:

• The town halls / MP meetings / Minister meetings / citizen-led meetings are discussing "electronic voting" despite this not being in the Parliamentary mandate for the Special Committee on Electoral Reform.
• Nowhere that I can find is "electronic voting" defined.  Apparently it means voting machines, but this is not actually written down anywhere.

Labels: #CdnDemocracy, #EngagedInER, #ERRE, canada, e-voting, electronic voting

Make It Short

The Canadian government has already been cyberattacked by nation-states, computer security experts warn that online voting is not secure, national security experts warn that online voting is not secure, and online voting won't increase turnout.

Here's the evidence:

• Canadian government departments have already been seriously hacked (attacked) by other countries. Departments including the Finance Department, Treasury Board Secretariat and Defence Research and Development Canada (in 2011) and the National Research Council (in 2014) were successfully attacked. These attacks resulted in significant disruption and months worth of technical work in order to recover.
• Canada's Chief Electoral Officer is concerned about "challenges that online voting present for the integrity and secrecy of the vote" and says "caution is needed in moving forward to ensure that Canadians continue to have the same high level of trust in the integrity of elections"
• Internet voting does not appreciably increase turnout, including youth turnout.  In general the people who take advantage of voting online are middle-aged voters who would have voted at a polling station anyway.  (I realise this may seem counterintuitive, but the evidence shows this again and again, in country after country, including in Canada.)  
• The largest US organisation of computer scientists, the ACM, has a consensus recommendation opposing the use of Internet voting: "systems need some means of preserving the ability to audit and/or recount the votes.  At the present, paper-based systems provide the best available technology to do this."
• The Australian Parliament, after an extensive inquiry in 2013 specifially about electronic and online voting, with 20 hearings and over 200 submissions, concluded "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."
• The US Department of Homeland Security recommends against Internet voting: "We believe that online voting, especially online voting in large scale, introduces great risk into the election system by threatening voters’ expectations of confidentiality, accountability and security" says Neil Jenkins, Senior Advisor for Cybersecurity Capabilities and Strategy

As further quick background I recommend:

• Why Electronic [and Online] Voting is a BAD Idea - an 8 minute video by Tom Scott
• New Brunswick has a reasonably balanced briefing (PDF) available (for its own voting consultation).  There are 2 pages on Internet voting; pages 18-19.  Vote par Internet - de la page 20 à la page 21 dans « Renforcer la démocratie au Nouveau-Brunswick » (PDF)

I Want To Know More

• Eric Geller has written a comprehensive article about online voting, interviewing many of the experts in the field.
• Andrew Appel has done a 20 minute video explaining the history of voting and the issues with online voting
• J. Alex Halderman has written a comprehensive book chapter (PDF) covering real world security risks with electronic voting and (in section 7.3) Internet voting
• J. Alex Halderman has done a 21 minute video about technical risks associated with Internet voting 
• Independent Report on E-voting in Estonia
• Australian Parliamentary Library report from 2012 - e-voting: the promise and the practice, particularly the section International experience with e-voting (this is the kind of report that Canada should have produced, or at least we should have cited this report, along with all of the material I have provided above)

Labels: #CdnDemocracy, #EngagedInER, #ERRE, canada, internet voting, online voting

The background information provided by the Special Committee on Electoral Reform is wildly inadequate in the context of online voting.  It provides only four short paragraphs.  There is no direct citation of computer scientists or computer security experts in the background paper.  I had considered this a problem, but not an insurmountable one, but now that background paper is the only information provided to inform citizens completing the committee's online survey.


The background paper does not draw upon sufficient evidence, and its "on the one hand, on the other hand" conclusion is weak.  See my previous blog post Online voting section of Background Paper 2016-06-E on Electoral Systems.

Before you complete the online voting section of the Electoral Reform survey, I encourage you to review the evidence provided below.

Make It Short

The Canadian government has already been cyberattacked by nation-states, computer security experts warn that online voting is not secure, national security experts warn that online voting is not secure, and online voting won't increase turnout.

Here's the evidence:

• Canadian government departments have already been seriously hacked (attacked) by other countries. Departments including the Finance Department, Treasury Board Secretariat and Defence Research and Development Canada (in 2011) and the National Research Council (in 2014) were successfully attacked. These attacks resulted in significant disruption and months worth of technical work in order to recover.
• Canada's Chief Electoral Officer is concerned about "challenges that online voting present for the integrity and secrecy of the vote" and says "caution is needed in moving forward to ensure that Canadians continue to have the same high level of trust in the integrity of elections"
• Internet voting does not appreciably increase turnout, including youth turnout.  In general the people who take advantage of voting online are middle-aged voters who would have voted at a polling station anyway.  (I realise this may seem counterintuitive, but the evidence shows this again and again, in country after country, including in Canada.)  
• The largest US organisation of computer scientists, the ACM, has a consensus recommendation opposing the use of Internet voting: "systems need some means of preserving the ability to audit and/or recount the votes.  At the present, paper-based systems provide the best available technology to do this."
• The Australian Parliament, after an extensive inquiry in 2013 specifially about electronic and online voting, with 20 hearings and over 200 submissions, concluded "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."
• The US Department of Homeland Security recommends against Internet voting: "We believe that online voting, especially online voting in large scale, introduces great risk into the election system by threatening voters’ expectations of confidentiality, accountability and security" says Neil Jenkins, Senior Advisor for Cybersecurity Capabilities and Strategy

As further quick background I recommend:

• Why Electronic [and Online] Voting is a BAD Idea - an 8 minute video by Tom Scott
• New Brunswick has a reasonably balanced briefing (PDF) available (for its own voting consultation).  There are 2 pages on Internet voting; pages 18-19.  Vote par Internet - de la page 20 à la page 21 dans « Renforcer la démocratie au Nouveau-Brunswick » (PDF)

I Want To Know More

• Eric Geller has written a comprehensive article about online voting, interviewing many of the experts in the field.
• Andrew Appel has done a 20 minute video explaining the history of voting and the issues with online voting
• J. Alex Halderman has written a comprehensive book chapter (PDF) covering real world security risks with electronic voting and (in section 7.3) Internet voting
• J. Alex Halderman has done a 21 minute video about technical risks associated with Internet voting 
• Independent Report on E-voting in Estonia
• Australian Parliamentary Library report from 2012 - e-voting: the promise and the practice, particularly the section International experience with e-voting (this is the kind of report that Canada should have produced, or at least we should have cited this report, along with all of the material I have provided above)

Beyond that, there are 12 years worth of material in this blog itself

http://blog.papervotecanada.ca/

and 6 years worth of material in my Twitter

http://twitter.com/papervote

I'm happy to respond to specific requests for particular evidence related to Internet voting. 

Take the Survey

Now that you've had a chance to get a proper briefing with relevant evidence, I encourage you to complete the online survey (deadline unknown; presumably before deadline October 7, 2016) or use any of the other methods to contribute to the Special Committee on Electoral Reform.

Labels: #CdnDemocracy, #ERRE, canada, consultation, internet voting, online voting

Intrusions into computer systems by sophisticated attackers ("hacks") have already happened multiple times for multiple Canadian government departments. Some of these attacks have been attributed to other nation-states. This means the risk of attack to online voting is far from theoretical.

• CBC - Foreign hackers attack Canadian government - Finance, Treasury Board Secretariat and Defence Research and Development Canada - Feb 16, 2011
• Reuters - Canada says cyber-attack serious, won't harm budget - Finance Department and Treasury Board [Secretariat] attacked - Feb 17, 2011
• Wikipedia - 2011 Canadian government hackings
• CBC - Chinese cyberattack hits Canada's National Research Council -  Jul 29, 2014
• Government of Canada - Statement by the Chief Information Officer for the Government of Canada - Jul 29, 2014
• Globe and Mail - Extensive fallout from Chinese hack of National Research Council - Sep 2, 2016

Quote from the CIO of Canada, July 29, 2014:

Government of Canada computer networks, like those of other governments and the private sector, are under increasing threat of cyber-attack.

Labels: canada, cybersecurity

There seems to be an idea that if we introduced Internet voting, turnout would jump, trending towards 100%.

Endlessly cited for the advantages of Internet voting is Estonia.
It's very Canadian to always assume some other country's system must be better.
But the reality is that after offering Internet voting for national elections starting in 2007, Estonia had lower turnout in 2015 than Canada.

I'll say that again for emphasis

After almost a decade of offering Internet voting, Estonia had a lower turnout in its 2015 Parliamentary election than Canada did.

Country	2011 Turnout	2015 Turnout
Canada	61.1%	68.3%
Estonia	63.5%	64.2%

Note: In order to ensure the numbers are roughly comparable, I am comparing only Parliamentary elections.

Data are from

• Statistics about Internet Voting in Estonia
• Elections Canada - Voter turnout for the 2015, 2011, 2008 and 2006 general elections

In addition to this, an independent analysis of Estonian e-voting indicated that

• there were staggering gaps in procedural and operational security
• the architecture of the system leaves it open to cyberattacks from foreign powers, such as Russia

Previously:
July 6, 2016  evidence about online voting (particularly turnout)

Labels: canada, Estonia, internet voting, online voting, voter turnout

UPDATE 2016-10-16: The commission hasn't yet been formed, but they are already asking for comments by November 30, 2016.  You can submit comments e.g. by email to Consultations.ECO-BCE@gnb.ca

If you want to be on the committee itself, the deadline to apply is October 19, 2016.

ENDUPDATE 

CBC News - Voting reform ideas put forward by Liberals - July 5, 2016

A consultation process on overhauling the province's electoral system is being launched by Premier Brian Gallant's Liberal government in time for the 2018 election.

The Liberals tabled a 49-page discussion paper in the legislature Tuesday [July 5, 2016], hoping it will serve as a guide for a committee of MLAs that it plans to appoint later this week.

The document includes ideas such as online voting, lowering the voting age to 16 years of age from its current 18 years, and changing the way MLAs are elected, including options such as a preferential ballot or a proportional-representation system.

The discussion paper is called "Strengthening New Brunswick’s Democracy" and is available from the Government of New Brunswick website (GNB.ca) at

http://www.gnb.ca/legis/business/currentsession/58/58-2/LegDoc/Eng/58-2July/SNBD.pdf

The Internet voting section is pages 18-19.  I haven't had time to review it.

UPDATE 2016-07-15: I have reviewed the Internet voting section and it is good.  It makes it clear there are still lots of risks and unsolved problems.  ENDUPDATE

It is also available in print bilingual and in a French PDF, here are the ISBNs

ISBN 978-1- 4605-1033-9 (Print Bilingual)
ISBN 978-1- 4605-1034-6 (PDF English)
ISBN 978-1- 4605-1035-3 (PDF French)

I don't know what the mechanisms for participation will be.  I will update this post when I have more information.

UPDATE 2016-07-15:

I found the news releases

The provincial government has tabled the discussion paper and will ask the legislature to strike a select committee to consider its contents.

It is expected that hearings will take place in the fall [2016] with a report due by early 2017. The plan is to allow for any changes to be implemented in advance of the 2018 general election.

Government of New Brunswick - Government submits electoral reform options to legislative assembly - July 5, 2016

Le gouvernement soumet des options de réforme électorale à l’Assemblée législative - 05 juillet 2016

As of July 15, 2016 there is no electoral reform committee listed under Legislative Committees - Select Committees.

For the French version of the discussion paper, see

Vote par Internet - de la page 20 à la page 21 dans « Renforcer la démocratie au Nouveau-Brunswick » (PDF)

Labels: canada, consultation, internet voting, new brunswick, online voting

Go vote, in the assurance that your vote will be accurately counted.

http://elections.ca/

Labels: canada, elections canada

Thursday April 28, 2011 at noon Eastern (10 Mountain) The Rutherford Show will have a discussion about online voting, including Internet voting expert Barbara Simons.

You can listen to the show live - click the large "Listen Live" icon at the top of the web page.

Labels: canada, online voting

This is a kind of typical "if I can bank online securely, why not vote online" story by Lena Almeida

Let’s boost participation by allowing online voting

Canada.com - April 15, 2011

And this is a kind of typical "hey our government cybersecurity research lab was hacked" story

Top Federal Lab Hacked in Spear-Phishing Attack

Wired Threat Level - April 20, 2011

Because the answer is, you don't bank online securely. People's online banking is hacked ALL THE TIME. Everyone's systems, including national cybersecurity facilities in the US and Canada, get broken into by determined, sophisticated attackers.

Let me make it clear, I respect Ms. Almeida's question. It is not at all obvious to someone who hasn't stepped through the properties of our current paper-based system one-by-one, and who hasn't analysed the risks of a purely Internet-based system, why online voting shouldn't be as simple as filing your taxes online.

What you CAN do with banking is have their experts follow a forensics trail, undo the unauthorized changes, and return your account to its correct state. As happened to me recently when my credit card number was stolen.

But you CANNOT DO THIS WITH A ONE-TIME, ONE-VOTE, ANONYMOUS ELECTION.
If your vote is reversable 1) it has to be personally identifiable 2) ANYONE with technical knowledge can reverse it.

So that's why you can't vote online. It's not a technical problem. There are no technical barriers to voting online. Amongst many, many other things it's a security problem. Even if you can solve the security problem, you still can't verify what code is running (so open source doesn't help). Even if you could solve the security AND the code verification problems, you still can't stop someone standing over you at home as you vote, and threatening you if you don't vote the correct way (the coercion problem). Or someone can just steal someone's voting credentials and skip the bother of threatening them (the authentication problem).

Hackers will attack your vote, it's just a question of whether they succeed. And the company or individuals writing the code could be malicious, corrupted or threatened. Or the company making the servers. Or the people in the server room. Or actively malicious insiders anywhere along the network chain. Or citizens can be systematically intimidated into voting a certain way. Or the voting credentials of huge numbers of people who don't bother to vote can simply be stolen (e.g. monitoring the mailboxes of students and other young people for convenient mailings with PIN numbers that are unlikely to be used).

Oh, and even if someone miraculously everyone involved in the long chain between you and your vote being recorded on a distant server is trustworthy and not malicious, the software can still have bugs. In fact it's pretty much guaranteed to have bugs. Bugs which may not show up until millions of real users start hammering the real system on election day. So it can still fail spectacularly. Or even worse, fail silently and undetectably, misrecording or losing votes.

But other than that, online voting is a great idea.

PS If you think the TV shows have mastered this problem, I suggest googling so you think you can dance vote hacked or head right to

How the 'Dancing' vote was hacked - MSNBC Cosmic Log - November 19, 2010

Labels: canada, online voting

The threat of cyberattack is not abstract. When there is information of value, there are now very sophisticated attackers who will attempt to penetrate your systems.

Two recent incidents are:

* the Epsilon breach in the US, where Canadian email addresses were compromised

Air Miles among firms hit by huge data breach

* the attack on four Bay Street law firms

Major law firms fall victim to cyber attacks

Now imagine that instead of email addresses and mergers and acquisitions information, the prize was the entire Canadian election, the direction of the entire Canadian economy.

Do you imagine for a second that the same sophisticated computer attackers that have already successfully broken into computer systems will somehow not decide to attack an online voting system? Keep in mind that corporations and law firms have huge financial and reputation incentives to protect their systems, and they still fail. Do you think the government will do any better? Do you think that the millions of Canadians using their personal computers to vote will have better Internet security than Bay Street law firms?

Voting over the Internet is an invitation to successful cyberattack. And following such an attack, the entire integrity of your voting system is compromised. To compromise a paper-based election you need people to physically intervene simultaneously at locations all across Canada, somehow escaping detection of all the citizens and elections officials present. It would require massive coordination and risk of detection and capture. To compromise an Internet-based election, all you need is one person with an Internet connection anywhere in the world, pushing a button.

Labels: canada, cybersecurity, online voting, security

Links it to voter turnout (a false linkage).

A Liberal government will direct Elections Canada to develop an online voting option, starting with a pilot project for individuals serving overseas in the Canadian Armed Forces and the federal public service, and post-secondary students living outside their home ridings. The pilot will support a broader discussion with Canadians about an online voting option for every voter.

Full Liberal platform (PDF) - Chapter 4, page 73 "Modernizing the Voting System". Released April 3, 2011.

If you want a pilot of overseas online voting, look no farther than the US. The problems identified in the analysis of their online voting system - "A Security Analysis of the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE)" - were so severe that the system was scrapped. So we can save a lot of time by not repeating their experience.

Modern is not always better. Actually working is better. We have a system that works.

Labels: canada, internet voting, online voting

A couple good articles popped up yesterday:

* Electronic Voting and the Law: It’s Not Like E-Banking by John Gregory in Slaw ("Slaw is a cooperative Canadian weblog on all things legal")

Includes a nice section dismantling the "if we can bank electronically why not vote electronically" idea, including

Banking: If someone has tampered with bank records (or the system malfunctions), the participants can restore balance by transferring money to where it belongs. The legal system allocates loss according to negligence, or by statute, among innocent parties if the rogue can’t be found.
Voting: If someone has tampered with the election results (or the system malfunctions), it is very difficult to restore normality without running the election again, even if one can find the rogue. The rogue is never able to restore things to where they should be.

* Editorial: Time to consider municipal election reform by Glenn Kauth in Law Times

Takes on the "electronic voting will help voter turnout" myth.

previous elections have shown that few people actually decide to cast a ballot. So finding new ways to get them out to the polls seems like a good idea.

But in Calgary, we’ve already seen what it takes: an exciting election with inspiring candidates.

Labels: canada, citizen engagement, electronic voting, internet voting

These are tweets I found by searching @tonyclement_mp on search.twitter.com, in reference to Minister Tony Clement tweeting about Internet voting ( http://twitter.com/TonyClement_MP/status/28473132792 ) - also see previous posting.

This is obviously not a scientific analysis or anything, just the results I could find categorized as best I can. I didn't include my own (@papervote) tweets.
One person both asked a question and was supportive of it as a way to increase participation.
Two questions were from the same person, so I only counted them once.

I have grouped into
* supporting / interested in Internet voting 5
* questioning / concerned about Internet voting 7
* retweets (either without comments or without any specific pro/con) 5
* other 1

Supporting

Questioning

Retweets

These are people retweeting Tony Clement, without indicating whether they are for or against Internet voting.

Other

Labels: canada, internet voting

Tony Clement, Canada's Minister of Industry and head of Canada's Digital Economy Strategy, used Internet voting in his municipal election and found it convenient.

Labels: canada, internet voting

The enthusiasm for Internet voting is understandable. At first blush, there is a certain allure associated with the convenience of Internet voting, given the prospect of increased turnout, reduced costs and quicker reporting of results. Moreover, since other security sensitive activities such as banking and health care have gravitated online, supporters argue that elections can't be far behind.

Yet before rushing into Internet voting trials, the dangers should not be overlooked.

...

Caution on Internet voting appears prudent, since experts have identified a long and costly list of necessary precautions, including random spot checks and post-vote verification programs to preserve anonymity. Given the security risks, opening the door to provincial or federal Internet voting seems premature. In the zeal to increase voter turnout, the reliance on Internet voting could inadvertently place the validity of the election process at risk.

Toronto Star - Geist: Hackers, viruses threaten online voting validity - Monday March 8, 2010

UPDATE:
Previously

November 15, 2006 Geist on e-voting

Labels: alberta, canada, elections canada, internet voting

This is in reaction to the Elections Canada Internet voting event, some of the followup to it, and the ongoing trend for Canadian municipalities to adopt Internet voting (as well as the announcement that the province of Alberta will investigate it as well).

Our society loves the new. This is sometimes good, and sometimes appallingly, disastrously bad.

We had decades of "urban renewal", starting in the 50s and gaining momentum in the 60s, that with traffic planning as an essential element, very nearly destroyed the downtown cores of many cities in Canada, and actually succeeded in destroying the cores of many US cities. New is not always better. We are now, with enormous effort and expense, slowly attempting to undo some of the worse excesses of urban renewal, rebuilding and reinhabiting city cores, restricting the previously unlimited role of the fast-moving car in urban planning.

The people at the time had legitimate concerns. They found their cities old and tired, the trolleys familiar and worn. They literally could not imagine that their dense urban neighbourhoods would, rather than being improved by sweeping expressways and demolishing "urban blight", instead be turned into a dead landscape of poverty and neglect. Good intentions can have terrible consequences. We almost always cannot predict the future.

But Internet voting is an area where we actually have a tremendous asset, a community of computer security experts. UPDATE: As well, we can look the the experiences of other countries and jurisdictions. And we can look at other types of online activities. We can make some good guesses about the future. The experts tell us that computer networks are very hard to secure. Other countries show us that the complexity of a good technology implementation can lead to high expenditures with private companies, unsatisfactory results, and law suits. The ongoing, continuous security compromises of existing systems, with credit card numbers and other high-value information repeatedly stolen, tells us we are far from a world of high security on the public Internet. ENDUPDATE

We also have a recent trend of greenwashing - corporations that want to make money, but cloak it in some new language of social responsibility or environmentalism. Less paper is not always good. What consumes more resources, a single piece of paper you use once, or a computer in a data centre that is on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, requiring round-the-clock high physical and network security? In any case, since when is the foundation of democracy about how "green" your election is? Elections hinge on trustworthy results. You want a green election? How about we just all hold up our hands and someone writes the result down on a chalkboard? No paper wasted! No electricity burned! Making some vague green claims about reduced paper consumption is a diversion from critical, core process and security issues associated with Internet voting.

This is not to mention the fact that a good chunk of the supposed "savings" from Internet voting comes from eliminating polling places, from eliminating polling place workers. Do you seriously want a voting system that is less human, that involves fewer people, that has fewer eyes to identify and report problems?

In the most egregious example of Internet voting mythmaking, the myth of the technoyouth. The argument, almost always made by someone who is not young, almost always made without any supporting evidence whatsoever, goes as follows: young people "naturally" use technology, enjoy technology, interact with technology. If you can just "technologize" something, young people will use it.

This is utter nonsense. Young people like doing young people things. They do them with whatever tools are at hand. They don't think about the technology, it's background noise. They think about the activity. Making an activity that people aren't interested in available on a platform that they use, will not make them interested. The examples for this are trivial. It's a signature of the myth of the new that we are able to actually believe that somehow "the old rules" don't apply once you put a blinking light on something. You want an easy example: I watch TV. I watch shows I like on TV. I am not interested in sports. There are acres of sports on TV. You know what, this does not make me interested in sports. No one cares about technology channel for technology's sake except actual technologists. If you put boring middle-aged leaders talking about boring policies for senior citizens in a little video windows on a 20-year-old's iPhone, this is not going to make them interested in politics. It's nonsensical.

The overwhelming majority of the evidence from the few large scale examples we had at the Elections Canada Internet Voting discussion is that putting voting on the Internet doesn't magically translate into everyone who uses the Internet suddenly voting. It's just makes it easier for the people who already vote.

If you want turnout, then have a TURNOUT STRATEGY. A button on a web page is not a turnout strategy. Real turnout strategies might include:

* online and offline engagement with voters on issues they actually care about
- This is not easy. Real citizens have inconvenient interests. If you want to see how inconvenient true engagement can be, watch supposed super-Internet-connector Obama immediately dismiss even the possibility of a rational discussion about drug (specifically marijuana) policy, every single time it inevitably rises to the top of an Internet engagement attempt.

* Make election day a holiday
* Hold elections on Saturdays
* Put polling places everywhere - in workplaces, in grocery stores, wherever people actually go in their actual modern lives, not some theoretical church and community centre life that hasn't existed for decades
* Making voting mandatory, as it is in Australia

Notice how little of this involves technology.

Lastly, I want to address Internet voting utopianism. I would have thought the dotcom boom would have killed this, but it didn't. Life is not an endless progress towards a better and better world. Just because something is new, doesn't mean it is either inevitable or beneficial. The French Revolution loved their clean, modern new technology: the guillotine. There are lots of things that make no sense to do over the Internet. Just because it's there, doesn't mean you have to use it, IF IT ISN'T THE BEST SOLUTION.

Internet voting solves no problems, and introduces huge new ones, including:
* massive security issues at every step of the very long chain
* massive chain of custody issues
* massive privacy issues
* massive coercion issues
* handing over the core infrastructure of democracy to private companies and/or invisible government technologists
* creating a voting system that no one without a degree in computer science can actually understand

It will not save money except in some narrow sense. You can work numbers so that it looks like you're saving - oh look how much we save if we don't provide some education or some healthcare, as long as we ignore the huge future costs of impoverished people who are in and out of prison and huge numbers of expensive emergency room visits.

Oh look how much we save if we don't provide paper ballots - as long as we ignore the ongoing costs of data centres, legal challenges, and fundamentally undermining trust in our democracy.

Here's a simple thought experiment: would you hand a stranger $10 and ask them to deliver it to City Hall? A $100 bill? A million dollar bill? How much is your vote worth, how much is a national election worth? This is not banking, where you know the bank, they know you, and every single step along the way is auditable and reversable. This is a one-time handover of a treasure, your vote, to layer after layer of systems programmed by strangers, that you cannot inspect the internal workings of, where even the administrators of the systems can never truly know what is going on internally (a computer can always pretend to be executing one program, while actually executing another), in a system where you CANNOT VERIFY THE RESULT (because any system that lets you check how you voted, must inevitably provide the capacity for someone malicious to determine how you voted).

Internet voting is a lose-lose situation. The easier you make it to vote online, the more convenient, the less complicated, the less encumbered by multiple steps and complexity, the easier you make it for a hacker to steal the election. Worse than that, it is quite likely it is actually impossible to secure the election to the multi-billion-dollar risk level that would be appropriate, you simply cannot provide that level of assurance using the public Internet. The best you can do is involve every possible computer security expert at every step of the process, and then have a very highly informed acceptance of an extremely high level of risk. I don't see anything even close to this happening, other than in the Estonian system, which requires a unique national ID certificate for every single citizen and even then doesn't address issues like coercion.

In brief, this is really hard, maybe impossible to do well, and just as with the half-assed Windows-based electronic voting machines visited upon the American people by Diebold (now part of ES&S, an elections vendor that provides technology to Canadian elections), I don't see anyone taking even close to the level of necessary care in the current Canadian Internet voting situations.

Which brings me to my concluding point: to do this well requires an extraordinary level of computer expertise, testing, auditing, risk assessment, and 24/7/365 datacentre security, and a huge set-aside for potential legal challenges in case of fraud accusations. This inconvenient truth exposes the lie of Internet voting as being an easy, cost-saving citizen convenience, and so in most cases what I see is Internet voting advocates who are either ignorant of these issues, ignoring these issues, or deliberately trying to spin them.

Labels: canada, internet voting

I have looked at the materials provided for the Internet Voting event on January 26, 2010 and there are no participant biographies, so here is whatever I can find. I am listed academic credentials where available not because I think everyone needs to be a computer scientist trained in security to fully understand the issues, but because at least SOME of the people involved need to be computer & network security experts. I am also indicating corporate affiliations because no reasonable person can argue that a corporation providing Internet voting technology is going to do anything but present (through its spokespeople) every possible positive argument FOR Internet voting technology.

This is simply an analysis of the players from a computer security standpoint. Three main points are examined:
1. What is their academic background in computer security
2. What are their stated positions about Internet voting or, in the absence of statements, what is their corporation's position on Internet voting
3. If they are providing Internet voting technology, what information is publically available about the security analysis for these systems? It is incumbent for all voting technology providers to address all realistic threats to their systems in an open manner. There is no security through obscurity. A failure to do so shows an unseriousness about security.

I also want to make a key point: elections do not hinge on voter perceptions of security and convenience. Elections hinge on ACTUAL security. Asking members of the public if they think Internet voting is secure enough or if they are comfortable voting online or if it is convenient to vote online does not mean, in any way whatsoever, that the actual vote is ACTUALLY SECURE.

If citizens perceive a bank as (financially) safe but government regulation actually creates a situation where the bank fails (as has happened repeatedly in the United States), then it is clear the citizen perception was meaningless, what was important was the government failure to actually deliver an appropriate level of ACTUAL security.

And again, even if the system was actually secure, which is somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible, it still doesn't mean the system meets necessary requirements for a functioning democracy.

The Players:

* Michael Alvarez, California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
- Dr. Alvarez is a Professor of Political Science at Caltech and Co-Director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. His BA, MA and PhD are in Political Science.
- info from CalTech site

The mission of the Voting Technology Project is, not surprisingly, around technology: "All of this research and policymaking activity seeks to develop better voting technologies, to improve election administration, and to deepen scientific research in these areas."

It is important to remember that US elections are much more complicated than Canadian elections, with many more candidates running for many more positions, in addition to (in many states), multiple complicated ballot initiatives (direct democracy issues to be voted upon).

* Kimberley Kitteringham, Town Clerk, Town of Markham
- reported in media as advocating Internet voting

"We definitely think our early voting turnout was a direct result of the increase participation of people in the online voting process because online voting, from our staff and post-election survey, engages the voter that has been typically apathetic or difficult to reach. It offers a convenient solution for them because they can do it from anywhere in the world," Ms Kitteringham said.

yorkregion.com - Internet gateway to election reforms in Vaughan - September 30, 2009

* Andrew Brouwer, Deputy Town Clerk, Town of Markham
- Bachelor of Environmental Studies , Urban and Regional Planning; Master of Public Administration , Local Government Program (from LinkedIn profile)

* Cathy Mellett, Acting Clerk/Manager, Halifax Regional Municipality
- reported in media as advocating Internet voting

"We had people vote from Sri Lanka, from Korea, from over 50 Canadian cities and 25 American states," said Cathy Mellett, e-voting project manager for the Halifax Regional Municipality.

"That's really been the objective from the very beginning, it's about getting voters accessible and participating in the overall election here in the HRM."

Mellett said there were no serious glitches in the system during the voting period.

CBC News - 10% of HRM voters cast e-ballots - October 7, 2008

* John McKinstry, Sales Manager, Dominion Voting Systems
- a company that has literally trademarked the word democracy: "Dominion Democracy™ is our comprehensive yet flexible voting suite, designed to uphold the principles and ideals of the electoral process."
- message is shaped entirely around turnout

Voter turnouts continue to fall even in the face of aggressive communications campaigns at all levels of government. One way to improve turnouts is to give the voters more voting choice; choices that reflect changing technologies. Chief among these alternative choices is remote voting. In taking voting to the voter, you remove one of the barriers to turnout.

Taking the voting booth to the voter
- according to Google search (site:www.dominionvoting.com security) entire site has exactly two mentions of security
1.

Everything before and after the ballot is hosted on computer servers. There may not even paper ballots, as is the case with Internet voting.

Dominion can host your elections on our secure servers to ensure the integrity of your election. We pride ourselves on the security and permanency of our server system.

Hosting your election
In summary: your election, hosted on a private company's servers. How do you know they are secure? Because they pride themselves on security.
2. There is a single instance of the word "security" in their document Democracy Suite EMS Edition 2007 (PDF)

To address the sensitivity of the election process from a security standpoint, the system provides role-based authentication and authorization, while all data transactions are protected for greater confidentiality and data integrity.

While it is good that the system uses authorisation to limit access, and "protection" for data transactions (whatever that means), this assumes that a) the authentication credentials have not been compromised b) the network transmission is a particularly vulnerable and interesting place to attack.

Just on the second point: HTTPS encyrption of web transactions is essentially like using an armored car to transport money between two completely unsecure endpoints, between a house with no locks on its doors and a bank vault with no lock or security system. Attackers target system weaknesses. Since the Democracy Suite uses Windows computers, isn't an attacker more likely to attack the servers themselves using known Windows vulnerabilities, than to try to intercept the data in transit? The document does not address these issues. You have to secure Internet voting systems END-TO-END, from keystroke on the desktop to calculated results on the datacentre servers. This is impossible to do with anything approaching a high level of security (a high level of risk mitigation) for an election threat model.

* Alexander Trechsel, European University Institute, Florence
- Professor of Political Science and the first full-time holder of the Swiss Chair in Federalism and Democracy at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy.
- info from EUI site
- PhD in Political Science (from LinkedIn profile)

* Tarvi Martens, Development Director, Certification Centre, Estonia
- MSc IT, Tallinna Tehnikaülikool (from LinkedIn profile)
- Program Manager for Internet Voting at Estonian National Electoral Committee (currently)
- Development Director at SK (currently)
- SK is a company that provides "provision of different certificates to physical persons and organisations. Currently, the largest project handled by SK involves issuing authentication and digital signature certificates to Estonian ID cards." - http://www.sk.ee/pages.php/0203
That is, SK is a private company in the business of providing certification technology.

* Urs Gasser, Harvard University
- Dr. Urs Gasser is the Berkman Center for Internet & Society's Executive Director.
- graduate of the University of St. Gallen (S.J.D. 2001, J.D. 1997) and Harvard Law School (LL.M. 2003) (Note: these are all law degrees)
- info from Berkman Center site

* Tom Hawthorn, The Electoral Commission

Remote electronic voting via the internet and telephone was once the future of British elections. But trials held in the 2003 local elections found it made little difference to turn-out and raised concerns about security, privacy and transparency.

Tom Hawthorn, electoral modernisation manager for the Electoral Commission, says that remote e-voting is unlikely this decade, although he believes the idea may return. "In the short- to medium-term, there's things about the existing voting system - voting stations and postal ballots - which can be improved," he says.

guardian.co.uk - Voting searches for the x-factor - Nov 23, 2005
- 2006 presentation "What voters expect from a voting system" indicates high degree of concern about "my vote being private" and "my vote being safe from fraud and abuse" (in terms of percentages these are the top two concerns expressed)

* Adam Froman, President, Delvinia Interactive
- corporation that promotes Internet voting
- "Internet voting made a positive impact on the election results." from blurb on page for their report "Understanding the Digital Voter Experience"

* Dean Smith, President, Intelivote Systems Inc.
- corporation that provides Internet voting
- eight results for site search on "security" (site:www.intelivote.com security)

* Jason Gallagher, Open Source Software Developer
- I don't actually know who this is. The most likely match appears to be: "Lead Open Source Software Developer for McMaster University, Dept. of Family Medicine" (from PCHRI 2006 participants)

* Peter Wolf, International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), Stockholm
- MSc., GraZ University of Technology (from IDEA site)

I welcome corrections and clarifications and I will update this posting if more information becomes available.

Labels: canada, elections canada, internet voting, ivotecan