City
Should Toronto introduce online voting?
Mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi digressed from his much-important 'pool reform' agenda to talk about voter turnout and term limits today.
Rossi vowed to implement phone and Internet voting by the next municipal election to take on voter apathy. Of course, this would placate those who are lazy in a rather problematic way -- it really doesn't take that much effort to get to a polling station -- but it would offer a solution for Torontonians with limited mobility, and it seems viable enough considering that other municipalities have successfully implemented such systems.
Markham introduced online voting in 2003 and was happy enough with the results to use it again in 2006. According to the city's official website, online voting "contributed to an overall 2006 voter turnout of 37.6 per cent, well above the typical turnout of 28 per cent for a municipal election" and "88 per cent of online voters in 2006 [cited] 'convenience' as their primary reason for voting online."
But what about the cost?
According to Rossi, "on a cost per vote basis, internet and telephone voting systems are cheaper than traditional ballots in the long run. Printing of paper ballots, manual counting, and other features which add perpetual expenses to running an election could be scaled back as more voters use the electronic system."
Nevertheless, it'll certainly cost more than the $25,000 that Markham paid to get its program started in 2003. And despite Rossi's assurance that an online system would be cheaper, for the first few elections such a system was in use, there'd likely be a heavy cost increase before the traditional system could be safely scaled back.
Security would also be a concern, but when was the last time you shied away from buying something with your credit card online due to security concerns?
It's not really a hard argument to make that the time has come for our voting system to reflect not just the ubiquity of the internet, but the state of modern technology in general. Municipal politics are plagued by voter apathy, and if Markham's numbers can be used as an example, online voting is one way this could be addressed.
What do you think? Is it even a legitimate question or is it just plain obvious?
With notes from Robyn Urback. Photo by Bensonkua of the blogTO Flickr pool.
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I love the idea of online voting as long as it does not make it harder to vote for older residents (less polls) but as you note, the turnout didnt even go up 10% so it may not be the big cure some want.
Rossi seems very interested in ideas that have nothing to do with a platform.
Anything to get lazy people to get off their a%%es and vote.
The voter turnout is pathetic.
How about they give people 2 free TTC tickets for voting.
That's not the kind of security I'd be worried about. I'd say the main reason why paper ballots are still around is so that there's a physical "paper trail" that can be verified, instead of just a spreadsheet in a disk somewhere that can easily be tampered with.
A good point but electronic auditing and paper trails have come a long way, with redundant system backups to store votes and confirmations that individual voters can hold onto, in case there's ever a sense that there's been a big discrepancy. as voting in many parts around the world has sadly demonstrated, even paper ballots can be tampered with.
it kept the candidates on their toes and made the process much more transparent, yielding immediate information to the voters and the officials.
my knowledge of young people's civic habits is that they have educated opinions. but they also have lives. sometimes, they just forget. our generation applies for jobs, pays bills, and does intensive thesis research online. disabled and elderly aside, why wouldn't toronto get with the times?
forgive the admittedly-imperfect analogy for a second and just think about it: my students' association started with a poor turnout but in the course of a year it more than doubled and continues to rise. luddites be damned.
Cheers, and drinks on the candidate who will buy the drinks.
2006 census online. If the statistics
officers can be satisfied with the
online system, then the city should
look into this for the next election.
I've read several ideas here that seem would be more effective and cheap in improving voter turnout.
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I actually believe the current physical voting system actually favours certain demographics. More often than not I've found myself either voting inside of a church or a seniors home in the last few years - understandable as they are community gathering places. But holding voting systems inside of elderly homes puts a skew on the vote, as the elderly are typically unemployed and have all day to go down a few floors to vote. Where as the rest of the population has to arrange to get out of work, find there way back to their own neighbourhood, vote, and then find there way back. It's usually an incredibly inconvenient and not entirely obvious process.
Also holding voting stations inside of religious institutions seems slightly on the inappropriate side. While I personally don't have any beef with entering any building, religious or otherwise, I could imagine it being a bit of a deterrent for a mulsim person to have to enter a christian church to vote, or for a hindu person to enter a jewish synagogue to vote. If you have an online voting system you do away with most of the bias, you lose the need to vote within a certain set of hours and a certain place, and you also make yourself available to the 85% of Canadians who have internet at home.
Regarding online/telephone voting, I say its about damn time! However, I still wont throw my vote to Rossi.
Anybody who's not willing to get their ass off the couch to participate in the democratic process for--at most--a half hour a year doesn't appreciate what we have.
and what about the elderly? the disabled? servicepeople? convicts? the people who are working? out of town for the week? the not that interested? the last minuters? the internet generation? wouldn't they all be helped, or do they also not appreciate what we have? i think that's a sloppy way to group people together, and it impugns all their motives.
re: s, so if it's "wide open for fraud", where's the statistical evidence for that? i'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that electronic voting has a much better record than ballot voting. many, many times better. certainly, it'd be much harder to peddle influence by greasing some systems analyst than a poll clerk.
Are they going to keep the voting record of each citizen online now?
Why don't we just stick with what works here.
The payoff is minimal: you got 10% more people, and these are people who otherwise give so little of a shit that they wouldn't vote if it meant they'd have to get of their ass.
elderly people vote, these are just lazy slobs.
only exception i would make is for disabled, but they can already mail in their vote if they care to.
and perhaps the elderly as a collective whole do vote, but that doesn't mean uncle cletus, being elderly (and all the things that go along with it), has as much opportunity to vote as i do. as was pointed out earlier, certain subsets of the elderly (e.g. those in homes and the churchgoing type) have a distinct advantage in accessibility but that is not the same thing as making it easier for elderly people. this is a big, diverse city.
in my opinion the most legitimate argument against online voting that i can think of at the moment is that it's difficult to verify identity or proof of residency through a computer screen. instead, this thread includes various comments fearmongering about the bad man in the computer and name-calling of other potential voters that don't follow the same approach in the hope that they remain disenfranchised.
Online voting undermines one of the fundamental properties of our electoral system: secret ballots.
Voters become susceptible to coercion. What's to prevent me from paying you to vote how I want while I watch you submit the online ballot?
Regarding the point that online financial transactions demonstrate that online voting can be secure, I would argue that online voting is a much harder problem, again because of the need for secret ballots. There is no need to maintain anonymity in financial transactions. Plus every transaction includes at least two parties and because there is no anonymity, each party can detect any fraud or tampering in the transaction.
For example, if I send you $100, and you claim you didn't get the money, I can ask my bank where they sent the $100 they deducted from my account. Similarly, if my bank tries to steal $100 from me, I can demand they show who they sent the money to.
An online voting system that maintains voter anonymity is vulnerable to fraud: if I cast a ballot for candidate A, there is no way for me to verify that the system didn't record this as a vote for candidate B. If there was a mechanism to check this, my vote is no longer secret; my employer can ask to see how I voted.
Our current voting system maintains voter anonymity, and the physical paper trail makes it infeasible to perpetrate fraud on a large scale.
Incidentally, I realize that mail-in ballots violate the principle of secret ballots, and I'm not a fan of mail-in ballots for this reason. I suppose I can tolerate it since relatively few people vote this way, but if mail-in ballots became common (as proponents of online voting hope voting online becomes), I would have a real problem with it.