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

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