There was an interesting thing during voting, someone noticed their ballot stuck on the urn slit, and asked for help.

They brought this “official” ballot pusher, it was like a long ruler they used to unclog the box. It got me thinking on how archaic is this method, and on the many ways that this can go wrong.

I found that Canada did some study on internet voting, but things are very slow. https://www.canada.ca/en/democratic-institutions/services/reports/online-voting-path-forward-federal-elections.html

News about voting technologies always bring up Estonia as a modern voting system. But it seems that other countries have been successful with electronic or internet voting for around 20 years too.

Another thing I saw is that some of those countries have the voting age down to 16 years. That makes sense to me, they have to live with those decisions longer than I. They can drive and join the army (with parents consent), voting should be added to their rights.

I could not find any organization in Canada taking care of those. And from what I read in the FairVote Canada website, it seems to cover only PR.

I ask it here because I am not sure where to ask, since those seem to make elections “fairer”.

tl;dr;

Does Fairvote Canada only covers PR? Do they have any sister organization that would cover:

  • Electronic/internet voting?
  • lowering the voting age?

Thank you in advance.

  • NilsOP
    1·
    19 hours ago

    About the electronic vote, I found this when I was trying to find the source code of some of those voting machines. It is a Brazillian explaining in english the process of voting.
    https://rl.bloat.cat/r/linux/comments/jth7tj/voting_machines_in_brazil_use_linux_uenux_and/gc7yqic

    u/Marcos-Am Nov 14 '20

    Some things for the parrots that are only able to repeat what Tom Scott said in his videos.

    First, all the voting happens on a 10-hour period. Normally 8 hours but this year will be extended due to Covid.

    On our election there is no easy way to do it. We vote on the public schools and each machine is on a separate classroom, about 20 machines per school where I live, each school is about a km of one another, these machines have their own battery and are not hooked to each other. Each one of those machines have a table with a number of rows equal that of all people that are expected to vote in that classroom, each vote is then written in a random row so you cannot trace it back to a vote order. Hacking machines singular machines is possible, but to make significant difference on the voting day you would need to focus on the biggest electoral colleges, in hundreds of schools in a limited period. After the election closes 17 PM GMT -3, all the voting machines have their “memory card” transported to the local electoral tribunal where they are transmitted through and intranet wired to the Superior Electoral Tribunal on Brasilia to count, as far I could understand they count locally as well to double check.

    Now, the easiest place to rig votes in bulk is on the electoral tribunals, were you get a lot of party people and police monitoring the count.

    Also, I believe no votes are accepted before the end of the voting period, but other person will need to attest this information, maybe you rataktaktaruken.

    While all the steps of the voting process have visible insecurities, the scale of the election, the timeframe in which it occurs, and the compartmentalization of incoming votes bring higher reliability to the process.

    This information’s can be found here and here part of it was from personal experience as well.

    (There are plenty of videos around showing how to vote, how the machine works, the “hackaton” that happens before every election to crack the machines, …)