Online Voting

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#2101224 4-Oct-2018 07:26

If low voter turnout is the concern, make it mandatory like Australia. If you are absolutely determined to exercise your democratic right not to vote, you still can. You can either take the ballot and drop it into the box with a crudely drawn thingy on it, or you can just refuse to turn up and pay your $50 fine. But for most people where the decision not to vote is one of apathy rather than a deeply held conviction that not voting is the right thing to do for New Zealand, it will solve the problem nicely.

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#2101247 4-Oct-2018 07:45

People whinge about Sky being stuck in the 90's, get with the times, yet for this topic its stay in the 90's, don't use IT

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#2101259 4-Oct-2018 08:20

It's not about being a luddite. There is a genuine concern around electronic voting - both online and in-person - that has not been satisfactorily addressed. Those posters sarcastically mentioning that if online security was so bad then banks wouldn't be doing it would do well to remember that botnets and phishing attacks are very much a thing that by some estimates cost half a billion dollars annually in the US alone.

Not only that, but voting is not banking, and the threat is different.

If a thief steals money out of your bank account then for one thing you'll notice, probably sooner rather than later, and depending on circumstances may be able to recover some or all of it. If a thief tells you that you voted for the Free Lunch On Wednesday Party just like you thought you did but actually stole your vote and gave it to the Rich Kleptocrat Yacht Fund Party, then you may be surprised and saddened to find the election won by the Kleptocrats with 51% to 49% support, but you won't necessarily question it. There is every reason to believe the Russians had their thumb on the scales during the US presidential election, and look where that got them: a small nudge in the right place is all you need to tip the result your way.

Without getting into the argument - which has been around since Plato - in regards to whether Trevor the Bogan's knowledge of tax or international trade policies is really something we want added to the debate, I for one am definitely in favour of a direct democracy model - or more precisely a representational model where I can leave my vote with the representative for issues I don't care or know enough about to have an opinion, but take it back and cast it directly on those that I do - but there are too many questions that don't have answers to safely implement online voting right now. And in NZ, at the moment, we don't really need it.

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#2101267 4-Oct-2018 08:37

Ok, fair enough. What you are saying is online is insecure and fraught with issues, so dont use it for voting but its ok for banking, passports, IRD, census, etc.

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#2101272 4-Oct-2018 08:43

I support online voting for all elections, subject to sensible security and audit. There still needs to be postal, polling place or suitable option for those if have difficulty voting.

You can have a Realme id to enable you to get a a passport etc. bank online, vote for boards and trustees, complete a census, do your tax, kiwisaver and investments, rates, property records.

There must be options for voters to have id and authentication, view vote online, email confirmation, audit.

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#2101277 4-Oct-2018 09:00

tdgeek:

Ok, fair enough. What you are saying is online is insecure and fraught with issues, so dont use it for voting but its ok for banking, passports, IRD, census, etc.

Because, (once more) the threat is different and so the solution is different. Online banking, passports and IRD services affect individuals in ways which are easily detected and somewhat easily rectified. Corruption of online voting affects the entire nation, and is much more difficult to detect.

And that doesn't even begin to address the issue of correction.

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#2101288 4-Oct-2018 09:19

Not sure about on-line voting, but there was a big scandal around electronic voting several years ago when India tried to introduce it and a group of Dutch hackers demonstrated how easily it could be defrauded. I think something like this also happened in America.

Other than that, I am also in favour of referendum-style voting that gives people a direct say on major issues, maybe something along the lines of the Swiss system, but there does need to be some kind of buffer like that provided by elected representatives and parliamentary debate. Masses can easily become mobs swayed by emotion and fake facts. I would not be comfortable with a system that could make policy based on public whim.

As far as voting itself goes, what is the value of a vote by anyone who can't be bothered to get off their lazy backside and physically go to a voting location? Is this a youth issue? If it is, then youth need to pull their thumb out and get with the programme. Dumbing down the process to appeal to the self-centered doesn't achieve anything meaningful.

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PolicyGuy

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#2101295 4-Oct-2018 09:28

tdgeek:

Ok, fair enough. What you are saying is online is insecure and fraught with issues, so dont use it for voting but its ok for banking, passports, IRD, census, etc.

No he didn't

What he said was that different modes of usage have different risks and different consequences.

If someone interferes with your communication with

your bank, the passports folks, or the IRD, you would know either immediately or very quickly because the consequences are visible, and could take measures to correct the problem. The "bad guys" have a large incentive to try, though.
the Census, you would never know and can never correct the problem, but the consequences are in most circumstances negligible, and there is very little incentive to try
your vote, you could never know and could never correct the situation, and the consequences can be enormous - just a few hundred votes flipped might put a party over or under the 5% threshold - and there might be real incentives to achieve such an objective.

tdgeek

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#2101347 4-Oct-2018 10:00

PolicyGuy:

tdgeek:

Ok, fair enough. What you are saying is online is insecure and fraught with issues, so dont use it for voting but its ok for banking, passports, IRD, census, etc.

No he didn't

What he said was that different modes of usage have different risks and different consequences.

If someone interferes with your communication with

your bank, the passports folks, or the IRD, you would know either immediately or very quickly because the consequences are visible, and could take measures to correct the problem. The "bad guys" have a large incentive to try, though.
the Census, you would never know and can never correct the problem, but the consequences are in most circumstances negligible, and there is very little incentive to try
your vote, you could never know and could never correct the situation, and the consequences can be enormous - just a few hundred votes flipped might put a party over or under the 5% threshold - and there might be real incentives to achieve such an objective.

OK, to re phrase, we conduct our personal, private and financial transactions online knowing its a risk, and we accept that

SaltyNZ

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#2101348 4-Oct-2018 10:05

You are missing half the point: it is a DIFFERENT KIND OF RISK which has a DIFFERENT SET OF CONSEQUENCES.

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tdgeek

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#2101350 4-Oct-2018 10:08

SaltyNZ: You are missing half the point: it is a DIFFERENT KIND OF RISK which has a DIFFERENT SET OF CONSEQUENCES.

I didnt say otherwise in my last post, just reiterated that we risk online and accept that for non voting functions

darylblake

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#2101352 4-Oct-2018 10:18

Oh here we go...

There is no doubt that it would increase the voter turnout. Regardless of your views on it.

Personally I don't want it to happen. I think people that care enough to vote will get up off their butt and go to the nearest polling station on polling day and sort it out.

I think eventually it will happen. It will be a drive from the younger generation to make their lives easier. Personally I think it could create a whole load of security and manipulation issues. And remaining anonymous wont be able to be assured.

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#2101462 4-Oct-2018 12:07

Behodar:

frankv: It's the greatest idea ever, assuming that security & integrity can be assured.

if (false) { idea = greatest; }

So, why can't security and integrity be assured? Banks and censuses and a whole lot of other industries have solved the problem. How is an election fundamentally different?

frankv: Online voting gets us away from the whole anti-democratic system where you vote for someone who "represents" you. It opens the door to direct democracy, where every person's vote is equal.

You're going to have to explain this to me a bit better. Why would the method of voting change the available options?

In the past, it wasn't considered feasible to canvas, in a timely manner, the opinions of the citizens on significant issues. The typical solution is indirect democracy, where a "House of Representatives" or some similar system represents the people in decision-making. An exception is of course Switzerland, where they believe that the benefit of direct democracy outweighs the cost of regular binding referenda.

The cost of running a referendum via the Internet is a fraction of the cost of running an election, or the traditional paper-in-a-ballot-box referendum. So, in the same way that music distributors or television stations or paper-based censuses or (to a lesser extent) book stores or retailers are no longer necessary in an Internet-equipped population, the balance of cost vs benefit for representative vs direct democracy has shifted. It's entirely possible to periodically canvas the opinions of *all* the people on any number of issues for far less than the cost of running a Parliament.

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#2101466 4-Oct-2018 12:20

frankv:

So, why can't security and integrity be assured? Banks and censuses and a whole lot of other industries have solved the problem. How is an election fundamentally different?

Because banks and other industries have solved* a different problem. They have solved the problem of your stuff being stolen causing an immediate and obvious problem to you and you alone, with an obvious way of putting it right again.

Election tampering is completely different. You may never know an election has been stolen from the country, the consequences of a stolen election could be as dire as the Donald Trump New Zealand Edition(TM), and there's no obvious way to fix it even if you are pretty sure it happened.

*And arguably, they haven't solved that problem either - just reduced it under duress enough that as a society we can grit our teeth and bear it.

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#2101468 4-Oct-2018 12:25

sbiddle:

frankv:

Online voting gets us away from the whole anti-democratic system where you vote for someone who "represents" you. It opens the door to direct democracy, where every person's vote is equal.

You've totally lost me there.

Every person's vote is equal regardless of how you vote.

I was alluding to the fact that the "representatives" and the party faithful have more influence on the decisions being made than the rest of us. Whilst all our votes are equal, the value of each person's vote is less than the value of (currently) the Labour party heirarchy and MPs.

As well, you don't get to vote on issues you care about. You get to vote for a package deal of whatever Labour+hangers-on offers vs what National+hangers-on offers. If I prefer some elements of Labour's policy and some elements of National's, I cannot effectively express that opinion. Either I vote for the Labour package, and implicitly support some of their policies that I don't like, or I vote for the National package. Even worse, in a coalition world, often aspects of the package aren't decided until after the election.

And, you don't get to vote on things that have changed since the last election. You hope that, when some issue crops up, whoever is in power will do what the majority of the population wants.

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