[kwlug-disc] Say No To Electronic Voting ...

[Doug Moen]

The better system is Australian style paper ballots.
Apparently Waterloo had electronic voting in 2018, but for some reason I wasn't aware of this when I went out to vote at a voting station.

I consider internet voting to be inherently untrustworthy, given that:
 * the entire stack that internet technology runs on, from the CPU up, is full of security holes.
 * internet voting therefore allows state funded adversaries to corrupt the vote by remote control, from anywhere in the world.
 * any technical defence of an internet voting system based on algorithm analysis, etc, is meaningless, given that the software is inherently untrustworthy.

Paper voting is more trustworthy because all of the information processing happens locally. There is no way for hackers in China or Russia to remotely corrupt a paper ballot count taking place in an election office in Waterloo.

Paper voting is more trustworthy because the process can be understood by anybody with normal or average intelligence. There is no need to trust experts spewing incomprehensible technojargon about "cryptographic protocols" and so forth.

I agree that internet voting seems to be an unstoppable force, and that just means that one aspect of our democratic institutions in Canada is now compromised.

The actual method of voting isn't the only aspect of Canadian democracy that can be criticized or that could be improved. Just ask Fair Vote Canada for their opinions about this. From my perspective, the best democratic system I've seen is the Swiss model.

Doug Moen.

On Thu, Aug 6, 2020, at 8:25 PM, Mikalai Birukou via kwlug-disc wrote:
> I am writing this post from the rabbit hole :) :) :)
> 
> Here, Ontario minicipal elections already happening online: 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Canada#Ontario_2
> 
> I didn't know about this. How the saying goes? Horses have long left the 
> barn. So, we either provide a better system or consume whatever closed 
> source there is.
> 
> 
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