ROBERT KIRWAN - WARD 5
 ONLINE
VOTING
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(to come)
During the 2014 Municipal Election in the City of Greater
Sudbury, residents will be able to cast votes from their
computers during the advance voting period. While this is being
touted by staff and council as tremendous initiative that is
sure to increase voter turnout for the 2014 vote, I am totally
against the use of the system that has been installed and at
this point I don't know of any way that we can protect the
integrity of the voting with the use of online ballots.
Let me explain my concerns. Every person registered to vote in
the election will receive a voter's card in the mail. That card
will contain a personal PIN number that is assigned for your
name only. When you access the web site in order to vote online,
you will be required to enter your name and your date of birth and
hen you will be asked to
enter your PIN number. Once the computer accepts your PIN
number, you will be taken to the page where you can cast your
vote.
This all sounds very simple and I am sure that the level of
security will protect the secrecy of the ballot and prevent
anyone from doing anything innapropriate with respect to the
technical side of the voting. I am also sure that the totals
will be tabulated accurately.
My problem is that there is no way of identifying if the person
entering the PIN number is the person to whom the PIN was
assigned in the first place. I can think of my own situation in
my family when my three sons were attending Laurentian
University and living at home. If this were the case today, my
household would receive five election information cards with
five PIN numbers. If my children were not planning on voting
themselves, I could ask them if I could vote for them and most
likely they would say that there is no problem. If I was voting
with a proxy, I would have to follow a rigourous process that
ensures I have permission and also that I am only allowed one
proxy vote. With the online voting, I could cast a vote for
myself as well as my three sons and noone would be the wiser. I
would rationalize the action as it being simply a proxy vote for
the members in the household. So in fact, while it would appear
as if five people voted, in reality only two people would have
voted, but one person (myself) would have voted four times.
I don't care what people may say about voter "integrity" and
"honesty", or about how most people would not intentionally
commit voter fraud. However, in this case, there is no way of
policing the voting process. And it is questionable whether or
not it is voter fraud if your children tell you to vote for them
and then indicate to you that they don't know who to vote for
but they will take your advice and accept whoever you think
should get the vote.
Any system that allows people to vote more than once should not
be acceptable.
The city staff indicate that the system is set up to notice
voting that is done from the same IP address in rapid
succession. But how rapid would that be. I am sure that it will
not flag four or five votes that come from the same computer one
minute apart. And yet that is a definite possibility even if it
is done properly. Many families would use only one computer to
vote from.
I believe that the main reason for implementing the online
voting for 2014 is so that we get over 50% of the eligible
voters casting ballots so that the referendum results will be
mandatory. However, at the end of the day, we will never know if
we did receive over 50% of the voters casting ballots or just
over 50% of the ballots being cast. That is a real problem.
While I understand that many municipalities have adopted the
online voting, I have to ask why this kind of voting is not
being used at the provincial or federal levels?
Robert Kirwan's Election Web Site
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