Proposal for Online Voting in Canada

Elections Canada is finally proposing to do a test of internet-based voting for a byelection sometime around 2013. Being able to vote over the internet seems like a no-brainer. It will make it much easier and more convenient to vote. Online voting is especially needed in order to get youth to vote. It would also help in rural areas where people may need a car to drive to the nearest polling station kilometres away. There are also many people who intend to vote, but are just plain to busy that day to go out to the polling station, voting over the internet could be done from anywhere and would take less than five minutes.

Despite these benefits, reaction to online voting in the comments sections of the various news article is quite hostile. I find this surprising, so I will go ahead and counter some of the common themes.

1. Online voting will trivialize the democratic process.
This complaint is first of all based on a flawed premise, that elections are somehow monumental acts of democracy not to be tampered with. In reality elections are only minimally democratic, and due to the electoral system in Canada, chances are your vote will not even matter anyway. However the thrust behind this complaint stems from seeing all these trivial polls on news sites or blogs where you click your answer, get the results right away, and if you want simply refresh the page or clear your cookies and keep voting again. Obviously this would not be how an election would be run. Furthermore there is an inherent anti-technology bias in the idea that voting through the medium of the internet is somehow less serious than voting in person. The same kind of attitude is behind the sentiment that acting like a jackass on the internet is perfectly acceptable because "it's not real life!". This of course is a ridiculous notion, like if I went into work and acted like an idiot, and told them it's ok because this is not real life, my real life begins at 5pm each day.

2. Online voting puts the secret ballot into question.
This complaint stems from a basic lack of understanding of computer programming. You can have two separate databases to store the information, one will have a list of all eligible voters, and will simply put a true once they have cast their ballot. In another database the candidate who was voted for will be saved, with no link to the other database. The only way someone could figure out who you voted for would be if they could intercept the packets going from your computer to the Elections Canada server (albeit a trivial task) and then crack the encryption, which is not feasible for anyone without a supercomputer, and even then it would take much more time than its worth to know that information.

3. Lack of a paper trail/susceptibility to hackers
Here we have kind of the opposite of above, internet voting is too secret. Here we have the paranoid idea that since the results are stored in computers they are somehow less real, and could disappear or be changed easily. The databases storing the results would obviously need to be extremely secure to prevent being targeted by hackers. Ensuring security should be the highest priority and could be accomplished. The advantage is that the data collected is really only sensitive for one day. As soon as the results have been announced, the data results are made public, and any compromise is irrelevant.

4. Lack of security, possibility for fraud
This complaint is by far the strangest, as voting through the internet would dramatically enhance security and minimize fraud. The current system has multiple avenues for fraud, the first being the ease of voting multiple times. Let's assume you have lived in 3 different ridings within the same city over the past 3 years. You have a driver's licence with address 1 on it, a health card with address 2 on it, and a hydro bill with address 3 on it. Show up to the appropriate polling station in each of those ridings and you will easily be able to vote in each one of them. Let's say your parents live nearby in another riding, show up to the polls with them when they vote, have them declare the oath vouching that you live with them and you can vote there. Let's say your partner lives in 5th riding, show up to the poll and again get them to vouch, you've now voted in 5 separate ridings. If you live in a large city you could do this in a space of an hour or two. If you vote through the internet, you will only get one vote. Furthermore at the old fashioned polling stations they would have computers to check the central database as to whether you have voted or not, thus eliminating this rather simple means of fraud altogether. Considering the efforts political parties take to get people out to vote on voting day, this sort of small scale fraud is likely commonplace in the current system.

As for security, the current system relies on humans to run the process. Humans make mistakes, and humans can have agendas and be corruptible. Considering the decrepit old, and quite often confused senior citizens that make up the bulk of Elections Canada's polling day staff, there are likely countless errors of oversight. Last election I witnessed someone being sent to the wrong polling station while the polling staff were busy chatting to other people. Then the polling staff have to count the ballots. Computers without a doubt are infinitely better counters than humans are. In close races there are automatic recounts because the counting abilities of the returning officer and poll workers are considered to be inherently flawed. Interpreting markings would also not be an issue, and there would be fewer questionable ballots that would need to be looked at to determine whether it is a spoiled ballot or the voter is just really bad at marking an X.

Human error is the most likely case for mistakes in the voting and counting process, but someone with fraudulent intent could clearly distort the results by preventing certain people from voting or purposely skewing the count. Such people would be entirely taken out of the process in a computerized system.

5. Online voting would make it too easy to give away your vote
Here the fear is that if your idiot neighbour doesn't intend on voting, you convince them to give you their voting access number (if such a system would even be used) and then you can vote for them. A secure system would require some sort of personal identification to go along with your vote, a social insurance number, driver's license number, or other such things to be used as a password. It's unlikely your idiot neighbour will be willing to give you his SIN along with his vote, since this opens up identity theft issues. Besides up until the last two elections which required you to show ID at the poll, you simply needed to show your voter registration card you got in the mail. Anyone could simply go around, collect up all their neighbour's registration cards, and then literally vote early and vote often. The fraud potential inherent in the current system is again much greater than with an online voting system, but because people are used to it, they do not even think about it.


Despite these baseless complaints, I would argue that the real fear is that online voting could set a dangerous democratic precedent. If voting is a simple process that is in no way a hassle, and results in quick and efficient election results, why not allow more input from citizens on other issues? The internet has the potential to radically reinvigorate politics, because it makes the cause for representation obsolete. The old idea that political democracy does not work because people are too busy with their lives to go to townhall meetings, listen to speeches, argue their positions, and vote on issues all the time, thus we need representatives is rendered moot by the internet's ability to compress time and space. The resurgence of politics and the breaking of our anti-political deadlock where we are administrated by elected dictators is the real threat behind this fear of online voting. You would expect this kind of paranoia from capital, political elites, and the media, but it is surprising coming from regular people. However due to the sheer hegemony of the anti-political ideology of the neoliberal state, it is no wonder that people have both adopted this idea that politics is bad and that anything that may allow more participation is bad.