Kiwiblog

Katie Chapman at Stuff reports:

Porirua City Council is pushing to be one of the first councils in the country to offer internet voting at this year’s election.

Porirua Mayor Nick Leggett addressed the Justice and Electoral select committee, which was hearing submissions on proposed changes to the local electoral act, this morning.

There, he called on the committee to look at including provisions in the amendment bill, allowing internet voting at local body elections.

E-voting would offer a better way for young people to get involved, he said.

The postal voting system was irrelevant to many young voters – most of whom paid little or no attention to local politics, he said.

”It’s fairly safe to say that most people these days have a greater relationship with the internet … than they do with their post box.

”Younger voters were always the hardest to convince to vote, so making it as easy as possible was an important part of the process.

”We can’t afford to disenfranchise more than one generation of people.

”While young people would still need to be convinced to take an interest, it would remove at least one barrier, he said.

I agree that postal voting is dying as an electoral method. For local government elections we need to at least trial an e-voting option.

As I understand it the current law is flexible enough to allow some local authorities to offer e-voting later this year. All that is needed is for Cabinet to pass some regulations to govern how it is done. This should be done in the first quarter of this year. It is ridiculousness that 16 years after the Internet became widely available in NZ, we are still dragging our heels on this issue.

Geoff Palmer at Stuff reports:

In 2010, Washington DC unveiled its state of the art internet-based electronic voting system.

To demonstrate it, it held a unique public trial: a mock school board election in which people were invited to test the new system and even, they challenged confidently, try to compromise its security. Within days of it going live, an unlisted election candidate – one Bender Bending Rodriguez, also known simply as Bender from the TV series Futurama – was the leading contender, with 100% of the vote.

Which will be used by some as a reason why there should be no Internet voting, but look at the details:

They found an unencrypted copy of every registered voter’s authentication code, and those, combined with the public key used to encrypt the ballots, allowed them to alter every vote already cast and replace any subsequent ones with fakes.

Having the authentication codes unencrypted is a pretty big security hole.

While they were about it, they blocked other attacks coming from New Jersey, India and China, and noticed that hackers from Iran were accessing part of the system via a default admin password (“admin”). 

And that is just incompetence.

There are risks with Internet voting, but they can be minimised and mitigated. You could have (for example) a paper copy print out at Election HQ of every vote cast over the Internet. You can have confirmation e-mails of votes. You can have random audits.

I’m not an advocate of only having Internet voting, but in an era of declining turnouts, having the option to vote over the Internet would help turn that around.

Idiot/Savant at No Right Turn blogs:

Parliament unanimously passed the Electoral (Administration) Amendment Bill (No 2) today, making some minor but necessary changes to our electoral administration. During the debate, Labour MP Chris Hipkins argued that we should be looking at introducing electronic voting. On Twitter, he asks for people’s thoughts on the issue.

I have just one: is he fucking mad?

The evidence from overseas is overwhelming: electronic voting can’t be trusted. The machines are black boxes. The software is proprietary. They may be run by people with partisan interests. And they’re hackable (not just in theory – in practice). There’s no way for the count to be audited, and no way to tell if the votes entered by voters are actually being recorded, or just sent to the bit bucket.

Electronic voting means putting elections, a vital part of our democratic infrastructure, in the hands of unaccountable, private entities, with poor security and no transparency. We’ll basically be relying on their goodwill that they won’t fix elections. Oh, and blind faith that they won’t leave a yawning security flaw allowing someone else to. As someone who takes democracy seriously, I don’t think that’s a very good idea.

I/S is thinking that the way the US did electronic voting is the only way. I have been pushing for some time that we should trial e-voting for one or more local body elections. Have the option to vote over the Internet, as well as a postal ballot. So no e-voting use of stand-alone voting machines – just use the Internet.

We do banking and tax over the Internet securely, and I am sure can do voting also. We even have a secure government login service which you can use to register companies etc.

And e-voting can be audit-able. Each person who votes can get an e-mail confirmation of how they voted. You could even audit a random sample of voters to ensure their record of voting matches the central record.

And one could have the code for the e-voting software released publicly, so that experts can verify that it is does what it is meant to do.

So I’m with Chris Hipkins. The time has come to at least be trialling e-voting. The logical opportunity is the 2013 local body elections.

UPDATE: The Government has responded to the Justice and Electoral Select Committee review of the 2010 local body elections. They have said:

1. The Government will look at amending the Local Electoral Regulations 2001 to enable e-voting, with DIA to look into the merits and practicalities
2. The Government will explore the option of making the Electoral Commission responsible for the oversight of local authority elections

An article in the NZ Herald on how we will not have e-voting until 2023 at the earliest under current plans. I’m one of those quoted criticising the timetable and advocating we should be moving to trails in the very near future.

Anthony Doesburg points out that groups such as the Teachers Council have sucessfully run online elections with 80.000 voters.

A change I have advocated in the past is that the Chief Electoral Office be put in charge of all local body elections also (working with the local authorities). This change is beneficial in its own right, but would also allow testing of e-voting in one or two areas in 2010.

With all the boldness of a very slow turtle, the Chief Electoral Office is talking of trialling online voting in 2014, 2017 and 2020 with a possible implementation in 2023.

I absolutely support a trial before any decisions are made on implementation, but online voting has been discussed and trialled globally since 1996. An 18 year wait until we even trial it is manifestly inadequate.

The 2010 local body elections represent a superb opportunity to trial online voting. As they already use postal voting, there is less of a culture change. You merely include a username and password with their voting letter, and maybe have them get a one time PIN e-mailed to them also.

Now you don’t have to trial it with every local body. Just choose a couple where it really doesn’t matter if the system breaks down – say the Ruapahu District Council.

Online voting has the potential to increase turnout but also increase informed voting. One can have candidates linked to their election pages so people can read about them just before they vote. And considering we have a zero level of security at the moment for voting, online voting can only be more secure. Now again I am not saying rush in and have online voting for 2011 general election, but at a minimum it should be trialled for some 2010 local body elections.

No wonder there are so many Polish jokes!

WARSAW – Poles should not be allowed to vote online because the internet attracts people who watch “pornography while sipping a bottle of beer”, a former prime minister told his party’s website.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski and other leaders of his conservative party have said they wanted to rejuvenate their ranks and reach out to internet users after losing power last October when younger voters flocked to their centre-right rivals.

Poland’s election commission is floating proposals such as allowing people to vote online to boost turnout.

“I am not an enthusiast of a young person sitting in front of a computer, watching video clips and pornography while sipping a bottle of beer and voting when he feels like it,” he was quoted as saying on his party’s revamped website.

He added that internet users are “the easiest group to manipulate, to suggest who to vote for.”

The Polish PM maybe onto something here. One could combine e-voting with pay per view porn – the porn covering the cost of the election.