Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Canadian online voting discussion on The Rutherford Show
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.
You can listen to the show live - click the large "Listen Live" icon at the top of the web page.
Labels: canada, online voting
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
if I can do X online, then why not 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
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
iconic
Just pointing to some official Elections Canada icons for the 41st General Election.
Please note: the following reproductions are a copy of the promotional icons that are published by Elections Canada and the reproductions have not been produced in affiliation with, or with the endorsement of Elections Canada.
UPDATE: Removed in accordance with May 2 deletion requirement. ENDUPDATE
In general Elections Canada could use some major website and social media help.
That would move youth turnout a lot more than online voting.
Note to self: Apparently I am to make these icons disappear after May 2, 2011.
Please note: the following reproductions are a copy of the promotional icons that are published by Elections Canada and the reproductions have not been produced in affiliation with, or with the endorsement of Elections Canada.
UPDATE: Removed in accordance with May 2 deletion requirement. ENDUPDATE
In general Elections Canada could use some major website and social media help.
That would move youth turnout a lot more than online voting.
Note to self: Apparently I am to make these icons disappear after May 2, 2011.
* You are hereby granted a limited license to reproduce and display the promotional icons on your website for purposes of providing information to the public about the current general election by offering a link to Elections Canada's web site;
* The rights granted herein are for a limited term ending on May 2, 2011;
* You must reproduce the promotional icons in the format and in the color displayed herein and you may not modify, alter or adapt the promotional icons or any part of them;
* You will acquire no right or interest in the promotional icons or the copyright therein, except for the limited license granted herein; and
* You must indicate to the public that the reproduction is a copy of the promotional icons that are published by Elections Canada and that the reproduction has not been produced in affiliation with, or with the endorsement of Elections Canada.
Labels: elections canada
Thursday, April 07, 2011
computers never make mistakes
They do exactly what people have told them to.
Like say a former computer programmer.
Who counts the vote on a stand-alone computer. In her office.
And discovers over 7500 extra votes due to a spreadsheet copy error.
Is this kind of farce how you want to run elections?
from August 13, 2010 Journal Sentinel - Officials dispute reliability of Waukesha County clerk's election data system
and what happened in 2011?
April 7, 2011 - Journal Sentinel - Prosser's huge gain comes after Waukesha County flub is caught
Now let us imagine this story told this way:
* for security purposes, the elections official has boxes containing all the votes, in her private office
* oh and she's an expert in creating ballots
* oh and she just discovered another box of ballots over there in the corner
Do you think any elections observer in the world would buy this?
But it's all done with computers, so I guess it's impossible there could be anything suspicious.
Human nature doesn't change.
And humans program computers.
And humans create the security for computers.
Computer security does not exist in the abstract. Computers do not defend themselves or program themselves. But somehow people think it is a realm beyond human emotion and failings. In the end it's systems created by humans, used by humans, that have to resist threats from humans.
This is what happens when you vote over the Internet:
* Someone with some credentials they got somewhere votes. Hopefully it's you, with your rightful credentials. But it could be anyone who gained valid credentials, anywhere in the world.
* These credentials are used to vote. This involves your computer, full of hundreds of competing programs created by fallible humans, interacting with a website created by humans, over a network built managed and run by humans.
* The vote... or at least a vote, lands on a server... somewhere, a server running thousands of pieces of human-created software. A server installed, controlled, and managed by humans.
So the good news is, as long as you can absolutely trust every one of the thousands of people involved in that chain, and all of the one billion people on the Internet can't outsmart their security, then your vote is fine.
And the above is all if it's done WELL, not if it's some bogus "the counting computer is in my back closet" ridiculously compromised chain of custody.
Or alternatively, you could set things up so local people from competing political parties are watching one another, mark the votes on paper, watch the ballot box containing the votes, and count all the votes in public. In minutes (for a Canadian election).
So your choice is:
1. If you trust everyone who has ever created or maintained any device or software in the chain from your keyboard to the vote-counting server, and everyone with access to the server room, and everyone else in the world who is on the Internet, then Internet voting is a great choice.
2. If you trust people from your neighbourhood who have the very human motivation of competing interests, with a process that is visible to you end-to-end, and immediate local consequences if fraud is found, then you might want to vote on paper instead.
We are very very good at understanding voting risk scenarios in the physical world. We are very very bad at understanding risk in the digital world.
Where would you rather have your voting taking place?
Like say a former computer programmer.
Who counts the vote on a stand-alone computer. In her office.
And discovers over 7500 extra votes due to a spreadsheet copy error.
Is this kind of farce how you want to run elections?
Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus' decision to go it alone in how she collects and maintains election results has some county officials raising a red flag about the integrity of the system.
Nickolaus said she decided to take the election data collection and storage system off the county's computer network - and keep it on stand-alone personal computers accessible only in her office - for security reasons.
"What it gave me was good security of the elections from start to finish, without the ability of someone unauthorized to be involved," she said.
Nonetheless, Director of Administration Norman A. Cummings said because Nickolaus has kept them out of the loop, the county's information technology specialists have not been able to verify Nickolaus' claim that the system is secure from failure.
...
In March, Nickolaus said, she moved the data off that server and into her own stand-alone system. She has a backup on a second computer, she said. In addition, she said, as she programs for elections, she does frequent backups during the day.
Nickolaus said she was a programmer for 15 years before becoming county clerk. And she said her staff knows how to operate the system, so "if I get hit by a bus, this election is going to run just fine."
from August 13, 2010 Journal Sentinel - Officials dispute reliability of Waukesha County clerk's election data system
and what happened in 2011?
David Prosser gained 7,582 votes in Waukesha County, after a major counting error of Brookfield results was detected, County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus announced in a stunning development this afternoon.
Nickolaus says the reason for the big change is that data transmitted from the City of Brookfield was imported but that she failed to save those results to the database. Brookfield cast 14,315 votes on April 5 -- 10,859 of those votes went to Prosser and 3,456 went to JoAnne Kloppenburg.
"The purpose of the canvass is to catch these kind of mistakes," Nickolaus said. She called it human error that is "common in this process." "I apologize," Nickolaus said.
April 7, 2011 - Journal Sentinel - Prosser's huge gain comes after Waukesha County flub is caught
Now let us imagine this story told this way:
* for security purposes, the elections official has boxes containing all the votes, in her private office
* oh and she's an expert in creating ballots
* oh and she just discovered another box of ballots over there in the corner
Do you think any elections observer in the world would buy this?
But it's all done with computers, so I guess it's impossible there could be anything suspicious.
Human nature doesn't change.
And humans program computers.
And humans create the security for computers.
Computer security does not exist in the abstract. Computers do not defend themselves or program themselves. But somehow people think it is a realm beyond human emotion and failings. In the end it's systems created by humans, used by humans, that have to resist threats from humans.
This is what happens when you vote over the Internet:
* Someone with some credentials they got somewhere votes. Hopefully it's you, with your rightful credentials. But it could be anyone who gained valid credentials, anywhere in the world.
* These credentials are used to vote. This involves your computer, full of hundreds of competing programs created by fallible humans, interacting with a website created by humans, over a network built managed and run by humans.
* The vote... or at least a vote, lands on a server... somewhere, a server running thousands of pieces of human-created software. A server installed, controlled, and managed by humans.
So the good news is, as long as you can absolutely trust every one of the thousands of people involved in that chain, and all of the one billion people on the Internet can't outsmart their security, then your vote is fine.
And the above is all if it's done WELL, not if it's some bogus "the counting computer is in my back closet" ridiculously compromised chain of custody.
Or alternatively, you could set things up so local people from competing political parties are watching one another, mark the votes on paper, watch the ballot box containing the votes, and count all the votes in public. In minutes (for a Canadian election).
So your choice is:
1. If you trust everyone who has ever created or maintained any device or software in the chain from your keyboard to the vote-counting server, and everyone with access to the server room, and everyone else in the world who is on the Internet, then Internet voting is a great choice.
2. If you trust people from your neighbourhood who have the very human motivation of competing interests, with a process that is visible to you end-to-end, and immediate local consequences if fraud is found, then you might want to vote on paper instead.
We are very very good at understanding voting risk scenarios in the physical world. We are very very bad at understanding risk in the digital world.
Where would you rather have your voting taking place?
Labels: electronic voting
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
Cyber attacks hit Canadians. Again.
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.
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
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Liberal Party platform proposes online voting
Links it to voter turnout (a false linkage).
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.
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
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Ontario man allegedly uses multiple PIN codes to vote multiple times
“Wasn't he sweet?” said Yossarian. “Maybe they should give him three votes.” - Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
CBC News - Ont. man cast more than one vote in election: OPP - March 8, 2011
So now we have the cost of an investigation, and doubt is cast on the election.
But remember, Internet voting is cheap and easy!
This is just the tip of the iceberg of the catastrophic risk municipalities expose themselves to with this technology.
Or, as they say: “The municipalities are perhaps naive about the amount of risk they’re assuming,” warned ... the PaperVoteCanada.ca blog (The Hill Times, February 1, 2010).
Ontario Provincial Police allege Peter Byvelds, 60, cast more than one vote in the Township of South Dundas' municipal election on Oct. 25. Police said he used the "pin" code of others to cast extra online votes, but did not disclose how many times he voted.
...
[Steven] Byvelds [cousin of Peter Byvelds] beat out four other candidates to become mayor, garnering 433 more votes than his nearest rival. He said it would be up to the township's chief returning officer to decide whether the charges call the election results into dispute.
South Dundas was one of several eastern Ontario municipalities to use a mix of internet and telephone voting during its election.
CBC News - Ont. man cast more than one vote in election: OPP - March 8, 2011
So now we have the cost of an investigation, and doubt is cast on the election.
But remember, Internet voting is cheap and easy!
This is just the tip of the iceberg of the catastrophic risk municipalities expose themselves to with this technology.
Or, as they say: “The municipalities are perhaps naive about the amount of risk they’re assuming,” warned ... the PaperVoteCanada.ca blog (The Hill Times, February 1, 2010).
Labels: internet voting, ontario
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Estonian vote-counting system fails
I was impressed by the Estonian presentation at the Internet Voting dialogue (event page: Internet Voting – What Can Canada Learn?). Estonia has done a good job of thinking seriously about the technical issues.
But not good enough apparently, since their Internet vote-counting system failed during the election period.
Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR) - Elections Agency Fines E-Voting Company - March 7, 2011
via @VerifiedVoting
In Estonian, with video: Valimiskomisjon nõuab Helmeselt kahjude hüvitamist.
There's a bit more information in another ERR story
ERR - Electoral Committee Chief Apologizes for Website Collapse - March 7, 2011
There were also browser errors, which is a reminder that an Internet election is orders of magnitudes more complicated than a paper-based one. There are many different operating systems, web browsers, mobile devices... can you guarantee that your voting system will support all of them correctly? Or are you simply going to exclude people who have a particular set of technology?
ERR - Electoral Committee Chief Apologizes for Website Collapse - March 7, 2011
Although the election itself was March 6, 2011, voters could cast ballots in advance, including over the Internet. However, this option is not how the majority of votes are cast.
ERR - Estonians Head to the Ballot Box - March 6, 2011
In all, the turnout was 63%.
So you have a choice: either our paper-based system, in which results are rapidly counted and posted, as they have been decade after decade, a system that isn't broken, or a future Canadian elections official apologising when some or all of our elections system doesn't work, because of computer systems failures. If you think that Canada might somehow be exempt from these kinds of failures, keep in mind it already happened in Quebec: Report on Quebec's municipal electronic voting disaster.
But not good enough apparently, since their Internet vote-counting system failed during the election period.
After the internet ballot-counting system temporarily crashed on Election Day evening, the National Electoral Committee said it will demand compensation from Helmes, the company responsible for the country's vote-counting software.
...
"The database did not perform queries with the prescribed speed [...] Reliability had thoroughly been tested and it worked flawlessly," said company spokesperson Evelin Lang.
Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR) - Elections Agency Fines E-Voting Company - March 7, 2011
via @VerifiedVoting
In Estonian, with video: Valimiskomisjon nõuab Helmeselt kahjude hüvitamist.
There's a bit more information in another ERR story
Estonia's much-talked-about e-innovation fell under doubt by its advocates last night, when, after preliminary results came in at 20:00, a website breakdown impeded election results from arriving for more than 1.5 hours in the most critical time.
An unprecedented software error with the web system was a blow to the trustworthyness of the elections, said National Electoral Committee Chairman Heiki Sibul. "That fact that we have a problem with something as simple as displaying the website - that is not acceptable," said Sibul on ETV, asserting nevertheless that there is no reason to doubt the results.
ERR - Electoral Committee Chief Apologizes for Website Collapse - March 7, 2011
There were also browser errors, which is a reminder that an Internet election is orders of magnitudes more complicated than a paper-based one. There are many different operating systems, web browsers, mobile devices... can you guarantee that your voting system will support all of them correctly? Or are you simply going to exclude people who have a particular set of technology?
Further hinting to the technology's imperfections, another type of error, a browser malfunction, emerged while e-voting was still in progress, due to which voters in three known instances could not view several listed candidates. The voters were, nevertheless, able to cast their votes.
ERR - Electoral Committee Chief Apologizes for Website Collapse - March 7, 2011
Although the election itself was March 6, 2011, voters could cast ballots in advance, including over the Internet. However, this option is not how the majority of votes are cast.
For a large portion of Estonians, election day is already past. More than 27 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots in an early voting period, most of them via the nation's internet voting system which the tech-savvy nation first pioneered in 2005.
ERR - Estonians Head to the Ballot Box - March 6, 2011
In all, the turnout was 63%.
So you have a choice: either our paper-based system, in which results are rapidly counted and posted, as they have been decade after decade, a system that isn't broken, or a future Canadian elections official apologising when some or all of our elections system doesn't work, because of computer systems failures. If you think that Canada might somehow be exempt from these kinds of failures, keep in mind it already happened in Quebec: Report on Quebec's municipal electronic voting disaster.
Labels: Estonia, fail, internet voting
Sunday, March 06, 2011
organise online, act offline
... security and reliability problems have plagued the rollout of both electronic, kiosk-based, voting and Internet-based vote-from-home technologies in the United States. Annual political elections are hard enough to run without introducing yet more possibilities for voter fraud and abuse. Instead, new services, such as Smartvote.ch from Switzerland, use the Internet to inform voting at the polling booth.
Dr. Beth Noveck, Professor of Law - writing in her book Wiki Government, page 35
Dr. Noveck was United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer (2009-2011) and leader of the White House Open Government Initiative (@opengov). She tweets at @bethnoveck and blogs at http://cairns.typepad.com/
Labels: electronic voting, internet voting
Saturday, March 05, 2011
BC Premier-designate has online voting in platform
pp. 12-13 "The Family First Agenda for Change" - from a copy of the document posted at http://www.scribd.com/doc/49198972/ChristyClark-FamiliesFirstAgenda
ONLINE VOTING
When only half of registered voters in the province participate in the democratic process something is fundamentally wrong and it’s time to look at new solutions. Canadians have repeatedly identifed online voting as an option that could increase their participation.
Our government will:
- Ask Elections B.C. to name a non-partisan, expert panel to begin reviewing best practices from across Canada and around the world to investigate the potential of using an online system in British Columbia.
- Online voting will only be implemented if security concerns are addressed.
(The entire ChristyClark.ca site, including multiple blog postings that were under christyclark.ca/cc/ now redirects to http://www.christyclark.ca/designate/ - neither Google nor archive.org have copies of e.g. http://www.christyclark.ca/cc/2011/01/christy-clark-commits-to-being-most-connected-and-responsive-premier-in-canadian-history/ as it is blocked in robots.txt)
UPDATE 2011-03-06: Platform is available on Clark's site http://www.christyclark.ca/cc/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/ChristyClark-FamiliesFirstAgenda.pdf - thanks to @jordantsimmons for the link. ENDUPDATE
SIDEBAR: Thanks to @interchangepa for pointing me to this information, both in their blog post and then subsequent tweets. Also note Christy Clark is on Twitter: @christyclarkbc ENDSIDEBAR
"Only if security concerns are addressed" is reasonable-sounding, but very tricky. If this focuses on anti-virus scanning and firewalls, it will completely miss the point. First of all, it is impossible to secure consumer desktops. The number of potential attack vectors is huge. Not just network-bound attacks, but phishing as well. How bad is this situation?
IEEE Spectrum - The Risk Factor Blog - Canadian Government Restricts Web Access due to Phishing Attacks
The Treasury Board Secretariat of the Federal Government of Canada was penetrated by various attacks, to the point that Internet access is now blocked for employees.
In an environment where a Canadian government has already been successfully attacked online, does it make sense to put the entire Canadian voting infrastructure online? Does anyone imagine that those voting servers, and the desktops (and perhaps mobile devices) that connect to them, won't be an even more attractive target than the running government? Considering that the Federal Government is a completely managed computer desktop environment (all desktops overseen and monitored by system administrators) and it was still compromised, while public voters use completely unmanaged desktops, does anyone imagine the situation will be better in a public vote?
In any case, as I said, security is a distraction. Non-experts are not good at making computer security judgements, and companies with agendas can throw up all kinds of technical obfuscating arguments about secure monitoring of networks etc. etc. etc.
The real fundamental questions are core elements of our current system, which CANNOT BE REPLICATED online:
* simplicity and ease of understanding
- anyone can understand how a paper voting system works; only a tiny percentage of the population can understand how an Internet voting system works - assuming they actually are provided with all the details, which they usually aren't
This is why online voting is the OPPOSITE of open government. You can't get any more open than ballots publically cast in secret, publically counted. You can't get any more closed than bits travelling invisibly across wires, to systems people cannot see and cannot understand.
* verifiability
- anyone can verify a paper vote by recounting the ballots; no one can verify an online election, because no matter how many levels deep you dig, at the bottom the answer is "trust the numbers in the computer" - there is no outside evidence you can examine
* anonymity
- It is difficult to determine who marked a paper ballot. It is very very difficult to design a system where you can't determine exactly who submitted an electronic vote.
* non-coercion
- Does anyone imagine that someone sitting at home clicking a button on a computer can't be forced to do so by someone watching over them? Or even if force isn't used, what is the impact of peer pressure as people watch your vote on screen at "voting parties"?
The list continues - cost, ownership of voting infrastructure...
And last but not least, voter turnout.
This voter turnout issue is total BS. It's a complete backwards view of voter engagement.
If you start with the assumption that people don't vote because it is "hard" or "inconvenient" then the logical conclusion is to make it "easy" and "convenient".
The problem is this assumption is WRONG.
Voting is maybe an hour of your time outside your house. This is not a huge barrier. The same young demographic that is supposedly the problem area that is fixed by online voting is quite happy to spend many many hours outside their houses, doing things they care about.
People don't vote because they don't care. They're not engaged.
You can use online technology to tremendous effect to engage and organise people online. However this does not in any way shape or form mean that that engagement needs to end with clicking a "Like" button to elect a political party online. That online engagement can and should turn into tremendous voter turnout at the physical ballot boxes.
As we've seen in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and many other countries, you can get people outside, not just for an hour, but for days and weeks with their lives in danger, if they care.
You want to fix voter turnout, get voters engaged.
If you think instead the solution is to make a voting button on a screen, you're not only missing the point, you're insulting the fundamental concepts of democratic participation.
Labels: bc, british columbia, internet voting
DOMAIN NAME OUTAGE
UPDATE April 3, 2011: The domain and email should be working again. ENDUPDATE
Unfortunately I just discovered that in the ZoneEdit DNS service migration to a new platform, my papervotecanada.ca domain has gotten completely broken - no web redirects and no email. My apologies. I have contacted them to get this repaired.
In the meantime, blog URL http://papervotecanada.blogspot.com/ as well as this temporary gmail email address will work.
Unfortunately I just discovered that in the ZoneEdit DNS service migration to a new platform, my papervotecanada.ca domain has gotten completely broken - no web redirects and no email. My apologies. I have contacted them to get this repaired.
In the meantime, blog URL http://papervotecanada.blogspot.com/ as well as this temporary gmail email address will work.
Labels: meta
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
CNN reports on voting tech
"Use of any touch-screen voting machine is the equivalent of a 100% faith-based election. No votes cast during an election -- none -- can be verified as having been accurately recorded on such systems. Ever."
CNN - Analysis: Our votes are counted accurately -- aren't they? - By Dave Schechter - September 30, 2010
The quote comes from Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog - Pac-Man Hacked Onto a Touch-Screen Voting Machine Without Breaking 'Tamper-Evident' Seals - August 21, 2010
Incidentally, this statement also applies to Internet and telephone voting.
Labels: electronic voting
Arnprior voting extended by 24 hours due to technical issues
Many, many stories about this yesterday and today. Not just Arnprior was affected, but it's the only one that took the extraordinary step of extending voting by 24 hours. Other municipalities extended voting by an hour.
This is a serious voting system failure. I think "glitch" is a bit of an understatement. First you hand your voting system over to a private company, and then it doesn't work? That's a surrender followed by a failure, not a glitch.
Incidentally "we are just too popular a service" is not an explanation, it's an excuse.
If your system doesn't work, that is a technology planning failure. If the obvious visible parts of the system don't work, how much should we trust the parts of the system that we can't see?
It's interesting to compare this result with the glowing pre-election news stories about how wonderful this would all be.
Kemptville EMC News - North Grenville begins electronic voting Oct. 18 - October 14, 2010
Apparently it is not voting-day Internet-traffic-proof, sadly.
Incidentally, there is no difference between high real traffic and a denial of service attack - presumably a botnet could just as easily have shut this site out.
There's so much to mock about the tone and unseriousness of this article - it totally misses the point about Internet voting. The issue is not whether it's easy to click a website button or the server room is hurricane-proof. The issue is whether YOUR VOTE IS SECURE, ANONYMOUS AND CORRECTLY COUNTED. None of which the system can guarantee.
More pre-election fluff:
Arnprior EMC News - Town staff provide overview of electronic voting process Voting in municipal election runs from Oct. 18-25 - October 14, 2010
So first you pay the private company to use their Internet voting system (which turns out I guess to be a shared voting system), and then you pay to promote it to your citizens?
Plus which, define secure. Secure as in, it uses SSL? Secure as in you have a consultant report that says it's secure? Or secure as in you paid for a penetration test by computer security experts and they failed to compromise the system AND they failed to compromise the desktop endpoints that users voted? And you also paid business continuity experts to ensure it held up under denial of service AND network connection failure AND under high load?
People standing in a room counting paper is a highly resilient, low points of failure system.
Computer desktops + the entire Internet + server room(s) + the entire power grid + many many other technology elements is a many points of failure system.
This is a serious voting system failure. I think "glitch" is a bit of an understatement. First you hand your voting system over to a private company, and then it doesn't work? That's a surrender followed by a failure, not a glitch.
Incidentally "we are just too popular a service" is not an explanation, it's an excuse.
If your system doesn't work, that is a technology planning failure. If the obvious visible parts of the system don't work, how much should we trust the parts of the system that we can't see?
- CTV Ottawa - Electronic voting creates problems across eastern Ont. - Updated: Tue Oct. 26 2010 5:14:43 PM
- CBC News - Technical glitch extends Arnprior vote 1 day - Last Updated: Tuesday, October 26, 2010 | 12:05 AM ET
- Arnprior EMC News - Intelivote explains voting problems in Arnprior - Oct 26, 2010
- Ottawa Citizen - Overloaded e-vote system means Arnprior voters get another day to cast ballots - October 26, 2010 - also republished in the Vancouver Sun
- 580 CFRA News - Election Extended in Arnprior - by Josh Pringle - October 26, 2010
It's interesting to compare this result with the glowing pre-election news stories about how wonderful this would all be.
Kemptville EMC News - North Grenville begins electronic voting Oct. 18 - October 14, 2010
According to director of corporate services/clerk Cahl Pominville, residents shouldn't be afraid of the process, noting that if "you can order from Sears over the phone, you can use electronic voting." ...
"It's not a big scary monster," he says of electronic voting, which will be handled by Intelivote Systems Inc. in eastern Canada. "It's been done by thousands and thousands of people in eastern Ontario in previous elections."
...
Pominville stressed that residents using the Internet voting method needn't be concerned about the security issues of the website they are being asked to visit.
"Residents will be connecting to a website in a very large, secure room in Nova Scotia," he explained. "It's a disaster-proof building that houses this kind of stuff."
Apparently it is not voting-day Internet-traffic-proof, sadly.
Incidentally, there is no difference between high real traffic and a denial of service attack - presumably a botnet could just as easily have shut this site out.
There's so much to mock about the tone and unseriousness of this article - it totally misses the point about Internet voting. The issue is not whether it's easy to click a website button or the server room is hurricane-proof. The issue is whether YOUR VOTE IS SECURE, ANONYMOUS AND CORRECTLY COUNTED. None of which the system can guarantee.
More pre-election fluff:
Arnprior EMC News - Town staff provide overview of electronic voting process Voting in municipal election runs from Oct. 18-25 - October 14, 2010
(Town clerk Jacquie Farrow-Lawrence), along with deputy-clerk Maureen Spratt, provided a demonstration of how the electronic voting system, provided by Intelivote System Inc., would work. She then explained the extensive publicity campaign that has gone into preparing the electorate for the new system.
...
"It is a secure process," Spratt explained as she proceeded to demonstrate voting by computer.
So first you pay the private company to use their Internet voting system (which turns out I guess to be a shared voting system), and then you pay to promote it to your citizens?
Plus which, define secure. Secure as in, it uses SSL? Secure as in you have a consultant report that says it's secure? Or secure as in you paid for a penetration test by computer security experts and they failed to compromise the system AND they failed to compromise the desktop endpoints that users voted? And you also paid business continuity experts to ensure it held up under denial of service AND network connection failure AND under high load?
People standing in a room counting paper is a highly resilient, low points of failure system.
Computer desktops + the entire Internet + server room(s) + the entire power grid + many many other technology elements is a many points of failure system.
Labels: fail, internet voting, ontario, telephone voting
legal perspective on e-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
* Editorial: Time to consider municipal election reform by Glenn Kauth in Law Times
Takes on the "electronic voting will help voter turnout" myth.
* 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
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Twitter responses to Tony Clement on 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
These are people retweeting Tony Clement, without indicating whether they are for or against Internet voting.
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
@TonyClement_MP hmm.. I wonder if I can too.. now that I've reviewed platforms and all the info is fresh in my mind..
just a girl
mndTiiu
That's great! RT @TonyClement_MP Just voted in my municipality's election, online. Very convenient. This Internet thing may catch on
Dawn Luhning
dawnis
@TonyClement_MP sounds ideal. is it just your munic? if not, could you post a link? tx.
LD McKenzie
uncoolmomo4
@TonyClement_MP I think, that will make more people to perticipate in politic.
Tom Tun
Mrburma
Wish I could do that in TO.. RT @TonyClement_MP: Just voted in my municipality's election, online. Very (cont) http://tl.gd/6kfp9s
Heather Reilly
helyreilly
Questioning
@TonyClement_MP Was this a secret ballot? Bell has permission to use DPI to look at your vote. #privacy #cdnpoli
Laurel L. Russwurm
laurelrusswurm
@TonyClement_MP how do they keep it anonymous, authenticated and auditable? Otherwise online voting sounds great!
Dean Stamler
dstamler
@TonyClement_MP hum. You may want to watch this before the next election you vote online.... http://gizmo.do/au570z
Pierre B. Gourde
PR_BG
@TonyClement_MP How do you know your vote was counted? Is it possible for scrutineers to confidently say that all votes made through?
Warren Layton
thebookpile
Probably also very hackable. RT @TonyClement_MP: Just voted in my municipality's election, online. Very convenient.
Ray Kuyvenhoven
rjkuyvenhoven
@TonyClement_MP Do you have a plan to make voting more convinient, fraud free and secure?Tom Tun
Mrburma
@TonyClement_MP How was the secrecy of your ballot assured? Then: http://is.gd/gg1pC Post-Harper (or ...Now): http://is.gd/gg1t5
Globe Genius
globegenius
@TonyClement_MP Few 'voters' have been party to court proceedings vs. Elections Canada. How was the secrecy of your ballot assured?Globe Genius
globegenius
Retweets
These are people retweeting Tony Clement, without indicating whether they are for or against Internet voting.
RT @TonyClement_MP: Just voted in my municipality's election, online. Very convenient. This Internet thing may catch on...
Kyle Gerow
KyleGerow
internet is on the computer now! Haha RT @TonyClement_MP: voted in my municipal election online ... This Internet thing may catch on...
Piotr Pilarski
ppilarski
RT @tonyclement_mp: Just voted in my municipality's election, online. Very convenient. This Internet thing may catch on...
Mario Miniaci
MMiniaci
RT @TonyClement_MP: Just voted in my municipality's election, online. Very convenient. This Internet thing may catch on...
Barbara Shaw
dharmabarb
Interesting... RT @TonyClement_MP: Just voted in my municipality's election, online. Very convenient. This Internet thing may catch on...
Greg Moore
Greg_Moore
Other
Dare I ask: would you want online federal elections? RT @tonyclement_mp: Just voted in my municipality's election, online. Very convenient.
Liam Lahey
Lahey13
Labels: canada, internet voting
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Canada's Minister of Industry uses 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.
Just voted in my municipality's election, online. Very convenient. This Internet thing may catch on...
Tony Clement
TonyClement_MP
Labels: canada, internet voting
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Michael Geist on Internet voting issues
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
Sunday, March 07, 2010
urban renewal, greenwashing, technoyouth, and Internet voting utopianism
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.
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
Monday, February 01, 2010
Ireland ponders how to dispose of its voting machines
Ireland jumped into the electronic voting arena, acquiring 52 million euros worth of equipment... and then determined the risk of using them was too high. So now they're stuck.
Times Online - Voting machines to be cast out - January 24, 2010
Previously:
February 10, 2005 understanding the true costs of voting machines
February 07, 2005 Ireland does things right
February 03, 2005 Canadian e-voting officials, behold your future: Ireland
Eight years after they were acquired for €52m, the government wants to return 7,500 barely used electronic voting machines to their manufacturer.
John Gormley, the environment minister, announced last March that he had set up an inter-departmental taskforce to deal with the disposal of the machines, after deciding they would never be used to count votes in an Irish election.
Times Online - Voting machines to be cast out - January 24, 2010
Previously:
February 10, 2005 understanding the true costs of voting machines
February 07, 2005 Ireland does things right
February 03, 2005 Canadian e-voting officials, behold your future: Ireland
Labels: electronic voting, ireland
six years
This month will be the six-year anniversary of PaperVoteCanada. The first post was February 14, 2004.
Labels: meta
