[MisterF]

So many security problems and potential for Fraud. Would you risk the potential verdict of a city/province/country to be determined by a group of fraudsters, or even better, a single hacker?

It's not a hypothetical idea, it's in practice in municipalities all over Ontario. In Markham it raised voter turnout by ~30% IIRC. If a municipality can do it, surely a much more sophisticated body like Elections Ontario can.

 

[Mongo]

It should be possible to implement online voting without allowing hackers into the system -- after all, we have PayPal and online banking.

My issue is what happens AFTER the votes are recorded. The big advantage of paper-ballot voting is that we have a physical record of the votes, that would not be the case with online voting. Without a physical record, there is little that can be done to catch tampering with the vote results once they have been collated but before they are distributed to the various media outlets.

We do know that this can happen. Some of the vote results from electronic vote machines in the USA during the 2000 and 2004 election (in particular, those under the control of certain Republican state attorney generals) are incredibly suspicious, with districts that had registered as 60% or higher Democrat in pre-election polls having official electronic voting machine totals in the 90% Republican range. I particularly recall one case where three adjacent, Democratic-leaning counties, that had used electronic voting machines, all somehow ended up with substantial Republican majorities -- and all three Republican vote counts were the same number! Some Republican operative must have messed up there. Another case that I read about months later concerned a small, poor, heavily black district that officially voted something like 60% Republican (it has been a decade since I read this, so I may be off on the exact number, but it was more Republican votes than Democrat). A reporter thought that the results seemed suspicious, so he went door-to-door through that district and asked every single adult resident whether they had voted, and if so who they had voted for. The results were that over 80% had voted Democrat. Needless to say, the state attorney-general (who in the USA is responsible for overseeing elections) was a Republican.

No doubt this exact situation would not happen in Canada. For one thing, elections here are under the control of a nonpartisan group, not highly partisan attorneys-general. But still, I am concerned that tampering with the vote totals can still happen. It is true that vote tampering can happen here too, but at least you have the physical ballots as a backup consistency check.

 

[allabootmatt]

I have to wonder about the strength of Hudak's position within his party in the aftermath of Thursday's result. The PCs did a reasonable job increasing their seat count and share of the popular vote, but there's no question he ran an awful campaign. Considering that there were already significant divisions in the party before the election between what remains of the Red Tory gang and the rural Landowner Rights types, his failure to win what should have been an easy fight isn't likely to bring those two factions any closer together.

Already we see media like the Sun saying Hudak's problem was that he wasn't right-wing enough (!), while more sober analyses would suggest, I think, that his relentless focus on tax cuts and social wedge issues killed him in the GTA, which is where they need to make gains. There's no immediate move to defenestrate him afoot--but who could blame some of his lieutenants for asking questions about his leadership going forward?

In the medium term, what the Tories may need is a leader with a better understanding of the communities they will have to win over in order to return to government--ie, someone from the 416 or 905, perhaps a member of a visible minority. Hudak's rural roots really shone through in the campaign, and to some effect; the PCs dominate rural Ontario as almost never before. But it's come at the expense of where most of the votes are.

Edit to add: That said, I wouldn't counsel the PCs to turf him immediately. Leading a political party seems to be the one job in which you're expected to get things 100 percent right the first time, which is a pretty tough bar to reach. Experience on the campaign trail and in the spotlight makes a huge difference. All I mean is that he's going to have to be very careful with his own party.

 

[adeel]

It should be possible to implement online voting without allowing hackers into the system -- after all, we have PayPal and online banking.

My issue is what happens AFTER the votes are recorded. The big advantage of paper-ballot voting is that we have a physical record of the votes, that would not be the case with online voting. Without a physical record, there is little that can be done to catch tampering with the vote results once they have been collated but before they are distributed to the various media outlets.

We do know that this can happen. Some of the vote results from electronic vote machines in the USA during the 2000 and 2004 election (in particular, those under the control of certain Republican state attorney generals) are incredibly suspicious, with districts that had registered as 60% or higher Democrat in pre-election polls having official electronic voting machine totals in the 90% Republican range. I particularly recall one case where three adjacent, Democratic-leaning counties, that had used electronic voting machines, all somehow ended up with substantial Republican majorities -- and all three Republican vote counts were the same number! Some Republican operative must have messed up there. Another case that I read about months later concerned a small, poor, heavily black district that officially voted something like 60% Republican (it has been a decade since I read this, so I may be off on the exact number, but it was more Republican votes than Democrat). A reporter thought that the results seemed suspicious, so he went door-to-door through that district and asked every single adult resident whether they had voted, and if so who they had voted for. The results were that over 80% had voted Democrat. Needless to say, the state attorney-general (who in the USA is responsible for overseeing elections) was a Republican.

No doubt this exact situation would not happen in Canada. For one thing, elections here are under the control of a nonpartisan group, not highly partisan attorneys-general. But still, I am concerned that tampering with the vote totals can still happen. It is true that vote tampering can happen here too, but at least you have the physical ballots as a backup consistency check.

Good points, but how do the banks do it. ALot of transactions now are only initiated online (such as an online bill payment) but im sure te banks must have some kind of other backup that can be referred to. Also, lots of employees must have access to our accounts such thatthey could take out funds or transfer them, but they dont...likely b/c the audit trail would make it easy to see which user account made the changes and thus they'd be caught rigt away....perhaps something similar could bedone for voting?