How can the Town have the arrogance to recommend online voting? – Opinion

By Jamie Jordan

It is very sad to hear that after all of the educating our little band, aptly named CSAVE – Citizens for Secure and Verifiable Elections, a group on Facebook – did for councillors a few years ago, that the next election will have an internet component. It is especially puzzling given that the last time it was tried in Huntsville it was a complete and stunning disaster – accessible PINs, servers that crashed in the middle of people voting, going off-line for hours, people who could not vote because the system reported to them that their PIN had already been used, et cetera, et cetera.

The requirements for a secure and verifiable election are simple:
1. We must know who is placing each vote so that only legitimate voters may vote.
2. The choice made by a voter must be secret.
3. We must be able to accurately count legitimate votes.
4. In the case of a close count it must be possible to recount the votes.

Let us take each of these points one by one.

In a vote conducted over the internet, Huntsville will have no certifiable way of knowing who is placing each vote. The notion that a PIN supplies this security is ridiculous. In the last online election in Huntsvile, hundreds and hundreds of envelopes with PIN numbers in them were thrown into the garbage at the post office. I, or anyone, could have scooped them up and voted hundreds of times.

In the internet vote two times ago in Huntsville, many people came to us and said that when they tried to vote they got a message online that their PIN was not valid because it had already been used. It is entirely possible that the card with the PIN number might have been used by someone other than its owner. So on point one I would argue that we will have no verifiable way of knowing who is voting.

A computer system must have a method of keeping track of who has voted. This is done by connecting each vote placed with the actual voter. The manufacturer may argue that this connection is never looked at but it is available. An unscrupulous vendor or employee might be bought to reveal who voted for whom. And as we know, all systems can be hacked. So on point two, who a voter is voting for is not secret.

On point three, the computer will count the votes it sees accurately but as I have tried to point out above, what validity is there in counting votes that have been placed by people who may have voted multiple times, or when many, many voters were unable to place their votes at all?

On point four, in an online system using computers, there is no such thing as a recount. There is just a process which runs at the touch of a button and will produce the same result over and over again. If it was wrong the first time, it will be wrong every time. No one from Huntsville will be able to see the actual votes. A solution to this would be to give each user a printable receipt so that it could be brought to a local place for a recount. But this process holds its own difficulties and expense.

Finally, let’s talk about computer hacking.

Here’s a short list of entities that have been hacked during the last decade: Microsoft, the Pentagon, the FBI, the US Military, CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service), the Liberal Party of Canada, the Conservative Party of Canada, the Democratic Party of the United States, the US Congress, the US Senate, Home Depot, Sony, FACC (an Austrian Aerospace parts manufacturer), University of Central Florida, US Department of Justice, the US Internal Revenue Agency, the Philippine Commission of Elections, Wendy’s, Dropbox, Oracle, Yahoo, CISCO, Citigroup, CardSystems (a credit card processor) and on and on. This is a tiny, tiny, tiny part of the list.

Then in the last two weeks, the CIA acknowledged that recent Wikileaks appear to contain valid CIA information about hacking the CIA has been doing all over the world. How can Town employees and elected officials have the arrogance to recommend online voting when the organizations listed above could not keep their systems private?

Hacking the Town of Huntsville might seem like small potatoes, but if I were a developer and knew that 10 or 20 municipalities were hosting their elections on the same servers using the same software (as happened two elections ago) it might be very worth my while to pay to have the election for 20 towns hacked to ensure the election of people favourable to my company’s bids.

The history of this process is that Elections Canada has given the provinces freedom to test alternate voting methods. The provinces won’t touch it with a 10-foot pole but instead are using the municipalities as guinea pigs to pay the money and test this immature technology out on their behalf.

There are many jurisdictions like Huntsville which have been burned by the process. Ireland had a disaster with voting machines. The Supreme Court of Germany has ruled that online voting is unconstitutional for reasons similar to the points above.

The reasons for going this route are convenience, higher voter participation and making it easier for part-time residents to participate. Why would we trade secrecy and verifiability for convenience? Voter ‘turn out’ neither grew nor dropped in the last two elections. It is rather the quality of candidates and the issues which spur voter participation.

We live in a time when the fragility of democracy is very apparent. Secret and verifiable elections are a bulwark of democracy. It is people who are expert in computer systems who are frequently those to point out their flaws. I would plead with the elected officials of Huntsville to use a mail-in vote and/or paper ballot for the next election. Or, at the very least, hold a referendum on this matter, that is not online, to let the citizens decide.

Jamie Jordan attended the University of Guelph in Oceanography. It was the only such University which did not have an ocean. He graduated with an Honours degree in English and Theatre and is now a computer programmer. He moved from the Hotel Industry (Ski Jump Inn, Royal York, Sutton Place Hotel and the former Skyline Hotel) to running hotel computer departments. Eventually he joined a software development company which made software for the hotel industry. He partnered with a Chartered Accountant in Toronto installing and training people in the use of Accounting Software on Macintosh computers. This led to acquiring an Apple Dealership which he ran with his wife Meg in Huntsville for over 20 years. Jamie has been a Filemaker Developer for many years, from Version 3 to the current version 15 with clients all over North America. He remains a local theatre enthusiast having appeared on stage in dozens of productions.

Want more Commentary? Click here!

Don’t miss out on Doppler! Sign up for our free, twice-weekly newsletter here.