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.

  • AlolanVulpixMEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    I agree with your assessment. The transparency and verifiability of paper ballots is a fundamental strength of our current system that electronic voting can’t easily replicate.

    The trust issue you’ve highlighted is crucial. Paper ballots create a physical audit trail that can be manually recounted by ordinary citizens. With electronic systems, we’d need to trust not just the code (which most citizens can’t verify), but also the entire chain of custody of both hardware and software. As you noted, even with sophisticated cryptographic solutions, the public trust element is essential for democratic legitimacy.

    There are also serious security concerns. Electronic systems create “single points of failure” that paper ballots distributed across thousands of polling stations don’t have. Computer scientists and security experts have consistently warned about these vulnerabilities. See:

    While I’m passionate about modernizing our democracy, I believe the focus should be on fixing the mathematical problem at the core of our electoral system - where millions of valid votes simply don’t count. Electronic voting might change how we collect votes but doesn’t address this fundamental democratic deficit.

    Paper ballots with proportional representation would give us both the security benefits you’ve described and ensure every vote counts toward representation. That seems like the right sequence of priorities for strengthening our democracy.

    • lobut
      3·
      3 days ago

      I’d like to start by saying that I agree with both of you guys.

      However like, I remember listening to JRE back in the day (yes, I hate him and don’t listen to him anymore) and he brought up electronic voting.

      I’m paraphrasing his show but he brought up things like

      • “if we bank online, how come we can’t vote?”
      • “imagine how many more people would vote if you could just open your phone and do it”
      • “why can’t we vote on proposals like we do on Reddit? with their discussions”

      I would really like to be able to just get a phone notification and “bing” vote, but yeah, there’s so many issues with electronic voting like you said.

      • NilsOP
        2·
        3 days ago

        From what I read, it appears that the problem is:

        imagine how many more people would vote if you could just open your phone and do it”

        It seems that a lot of decisions in Canada about voting, who can vote, where they can vote, riding size and shape, … are to get the right outcome from elections.

        Maybe after PR passes those will change, but who knows.

      • GreyEyedGhost
        2·
        3 days ago

        “if we bank online, how come we can’t vote?”

        There are two competing goals: traceability and anonymity. Banking has strong traceability and no anonymity. Having both is much harder than having one but not the other. Traceability is maintained until you put the ballot in the box, and the security of those boxes are maintained by multiple people. Banks also have traceability, by themselves and you, in part by removing anonymity - you can verify activity in your account. Anonymity is vital to maintain the integrity of the vote - if you can’t prove who you voted for, your vote can’t be easily sold or coerced out of you.

        “imagine how many more people would vote if you could just open your phone and do it”

        Sure, good point, simplicity would be nice, but part of the process is verifying who is voting and thay they aren’t being coerced. Do you have any proposals for doing that remotely? I can’t think of any.

        “why can’t we vote on proposals like we do on Reddit? with their discussions”

        We can have discussions about votes like we are, right now. It would be nice if more people did, and more policies could be easily read by laymen so we could do this without intermediaries such as news sites. And how to turn that into direct democracy, where everyone gets a vote, anonymously and verified? See above.

        I hope things trend this way in the future, but there are fundamental problems to solve before it can be safely done.

    • NilsOP
      11·
      3 days ago

      I deeply disagree. Except for the trust issue.

      First, PR is definitely more important at the moment. I will explain why disagree with the other points.

      Addressing first the videos I finally had time to watch.

      By the dates of those videos, there were plenty of examples of countries using electronic voting for at least 15 years. That person could easily use proper data to make their arguments, but they chose to engage in fearmongering, appeal to emotion, those videos are full of red flags highlighted in the Canadian campaign against disinformation. https://www.canada.ca/en/campaign/online-disinformation.html

      For example, the example of USB being available for people had to be addresses in many of those countries, right-wing populists associated with Russia were using to create chaos during elections. https://www.tre-ap.jus.br/comunicacao/noticias/2022/Maio/e-fato-urnas-eletronicas-tem-portas-usb-mas-so-funcionam-dispositivos-especificos-da-justica-eleitoral (not sure how to share a deepl translation link)

      With electronic systems, we’d need to trust not just the code (which most citizens can’t verify), but also the entire chain of custody of both hardware and software.

      In some of the examples I saw, the code is open source, or at least auditable, so is the hardware. And the entire chain of custody is recorded, and escorted.

      They are even more transparent than paper voting.

      Computer scientists and security experts have consistently warned about these vulnerabilities.

      Not really, the video you shared I already mentioned above.

      Countries leading in technology are already using some sort of electronic vote. Estonia is the leader in cybersecurity in Europe, most countries go there to learn and improve their systems.

      https://ccdcoe.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHiq5UfxePA

      Security experts and computer scientists learn, tests and probe for vulnerabilities so they can prevent problems when implementing systems that will help people.

      Not to foment fear and panic, and discourage people from voting.

      Electronic systems create “single points of failure” that paper ballots distributed across thousands of polling stations don’t have.

      Not really sure what you mean for single points of failure. Electronic voting varies from country to country, from having to visit electronic urns to voting on your phone.

      There was a case in Belgium when there was a software error in their electronic urn that gave more points to one candidate. But because of the way that data is stored, and the security chain around it, it was easy to pinpoint the issue and fix the tally.

      On the other hand, countries with electronic vote reported a decrease in corruption of the chain of custody, reduction in costs of compared with other voting ways. And of course, the reason I asked if it was part of the FairVote, increases of voters, increase in accessibility, and decrease in invalid votes (people commit fewer mistakes when voting).

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_by_country#Estonia (edit: I put the link for Estonia, but I meant the entire article, it shows the decisions of each country and why they are using or not electronic voting).

      Sadly, I can only find contents in English from Estonia and the European Union.

      But on youtube, you can auto-generate the subtitles, then change it to auto-translate. It might have some funny moments, like when the person pointed to a printer, and it translated it as “teacher”. But it helps to understand.

      This video shows instead an electronic urn, and how they set up it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrMLzqgKEI This video shows is from their Elections organization explaining the security chain and audits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IOtrQhpKBE

      The trust issue you’ve highlighted is crucial.

      If the people do not trust or understand, it might make things hard. And it is even harder when they cannot trust their elected officials.

      In my case, and probably where I am biased, I do not trust authoritarian regimes, and they are the ones trying to make people distrust elections, and technologies that can reduce corruption.