Paper Vote Canada

The Coast has an excellent and extensive article on issues with electronic voting, particularly as related to the Halifax Regional Municipality.

It's no wonder that Americans are increasingly distrustful of the voting process. Voting experts challenge every aspect of elections, including the registration process, the procedures at the polling place itself, the use of electronic machines and the counting and recounting of votes.

Contrast the sour American experience to Canadian elections: In this country, voters show up at the poll and are handed a paper ballot and a pencil. They check the box next to their preferred candidate and put the ballot in a box. After the polls close, an election official opens the box, and the official and poll observers from the political parties examine each ballot and agree on how the vote was cast. A final tally takes about half an hour.

The Canadian system is clean, unambiguous and fair.

But the Halifax Regional Municipality doesn't like the Canadian system, and is determined to change it.

iVote: Can electronic voting save democracy? - The Coast - September 18, 2008

Labels: canada, halifax, internet voting

There were e-voters in more than 30 countries, with the oldest born in 1913, they said.

"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.

10% of HRM voters cast e-ballots (via Carol) and 28,709 cast municipal e-votes (via sparkcbc Twitter)

Hmm, so let's see. You assign a PIN number to each citizen, and mail the PIN to their address, and the verification info is their birth year, AND you're tracking their voting location, which can only be done by tracking their IP address, which semi-uniquely identifies their computer.

So you know who they are multiple times over, through the combination of PIN, birth year, mailing address, and IP address.

So number one, goodbye secret ballot.

Are you seriously going to take it on trust that they won't be tempted to check to find out who voted for whom? That no one will ever be tempted to check this?

Number two, in a world full of good people and lots and lots of bad people, from Nigerian scammers to Russian mafia, letting people vote in a Halifax election from any computer anywhere in the world is a feature? Are you kidding me?

Labels: halifax, hrm, internet voting