Canada: Elections Canada wants more people to cast ballots, but online voting is still out | The Globe and Mail

Elections Canada is trying to ease registration for young voters and is pushing for more civic education in elementary classrooms, according to the federal elections watchdog. But online voting is still out of the question. Marc Mayrand, Canada’s chief electoral officer, delivered the remarks in an online discussion with Globe and Mail readers Thursday night. “Online voting would certainly make voting more convenient for everyone, including young voters,” Mr. Mayrand wrote. “That being said, there are still issues surrounding the integrity, verifiability and secrecy of the vote.” As for the robocalls affair – alleged misleading automated calls during the 2011 federal election – Mr. Mayrand said the investigation continues but he couldn’t give a timeline.

Canada: Proceed with caution on internet voting | Campbell River Mirror

The provincial government has asked Elections BC to look more thoroughly into electronic voting. While this makes a great deal of sense, given how much business can be easily transacted on computers, it is important not to jump into the deep end. This is because voting is a privilege in a democratic society, or at least needs to be treated as such. Many people in various parts of thje world do not have the opportunity to vote. In many cases when they do, the system is rigged. It would be foolish to think that our system cannot be rigged. Political parties and their most avid supporters know no bounds when it comes to trying to work the system to their advantage. When there are opprtuinities to stack a vote,  they will do so if there is little fear of consequences.

Canada: Credibility of democracy put at risk by online voting | Vancouver Sun

Chief electoral officer Keith Archer has announced the formation of a panel of experts to investigate whether British Columbia should adopt Internet voting. Let’s hope the panel focuses on the big picture before getting bogged down with technical details. Our democracy is built on the assurance of a secret ballot and the principle that one person gets only one vote. Under the current voting system, a voter casts his or her vote in the view of polling officials who ensure the voter is alone while marking the ballot — free of coercion. By contrast, any system that allows voters to fill out their ballot outside the supervision of officials cannot be truly secret. There are no safeguards to prevent someone looking over your shoulder while you vote on a smartphone. There’s no App for that. When you mark your paper ballot and place it in the ballot box, a magical thing happens; the ballot mixes with other ballots and you cease to have a copy. No one involved in the election process can connect you to your vote and you can’t prove how you voted.

Canada: Security of BC online voting proposal cited as a concern | Kamloops This Week

He’s spent the summer chatting with voters via Twitter and a web-based video feed, but when it come to actually casting ballots, Coun. Arjun Singh is still a fan of the voting booth. “I like the idea of being able to go into a booth where some other people are there and they can monitor whether people are being influenced or coerced,” Singh said. The B.C. government has announced it will ask the province’s chief electoral officer to strike an independent panel to examine Internet voting. Attorney General Shirley Bond said adding online voting to the range of options in B.C. could improve accessibility in elections — which could improve voter turnout that sagged to less than 30 per cent on average in the last round of B.C. municipal elections. The panel will examine “best practices” for online votes in other provinces and jurisdictions. However, critics of online voting argue there is more room for manipulation of online voting — or, just as problematically, claims of manipulation.

Canada: Mark your X online? | Kimberley Daily Bulletin

The B.C. government has officially requested that the chief electoral officer convene an independent panel to examine the potential for using Internet voting in British Columbia. Premier Christy Clark says it’s keeping a promise to modernize British Columbia’s electoral process. Columbia River Revelstoke MLA Norm Macdonald says it’s almost impossible to imagine an online voting system that would not be open to abuse of some sort. …  Macdonald says he doesn’t necessarily buy the argument that online voting will increase participation. “I don’t accept that it will draw more people in, or engage more youth. People have an obligation to be involved, it’s a civic obligation. It’s not difficult to get out and vote. People that are bed-ridden have the ballot come to them. I don’t think it’s difficulty in getting out that is the problem, especially with youth. It’s cynicism with the system. The only answer is to participate and change it. The system has to be relevant and authentic. You saw that with the Occupy movement. It was a bit misplaced but it did have youth activated and involved.” But Macdonald’s major concern is security.

Canada: British Columbia looks to e-voting to increase turnout | The Globe and Mail

In a bid to boost plummeting voter turnout rates, the B.C. government wants to introduce Internet balloting for future provincial and municipal elections. But research from Canadian municipalities and European nations has cast doubt on the power of e-voting to encourage more citizen engagement. “All of us are interested in increasing the voter turnout in elections,” Shirley Bond, Minister of Justice and Attorney General, said in a written statement asking B.C.’s Chief Electoral Officer to appoint an independent panel to examine the logistics of Internet voting. Current legislation prevents municipalities from adopting electronic voting procedures. … Governments generally consider e-voting for two reasons, said Jon Pammett, a political science professor at Carleton University. Governments want to increase accessibility and voter turnout, he said, but there is no clear evidence that it positively affects the latter.

Canada: Elections British Columbia studying online voting | CTV

B.C. voters may soon have the option of casting their ballots online in municipal and provincial elections. An Elections BC panel will start studying the voting method as early as September after being asked by the provincial government to research the potential risks and advantages associated with it. The request came almost a year after B.C.’s chief electoral officer Keith Archer recommended the government consider changing legislation to allow for trial-runs of new voting technologies. “Under current legislation that envisions a voting process that is entirely paper-based, Elections BC is unable to conduct trials of these new technologies,” said Archer in a November 2011 report. “Legislators may wish to consider providing greater flexibility to the Chief Electoral Officer to introduce, on a pilot basis, a variety of new voting technologies.” While there are some cities that use online voting, such as Halifax, no provinces in Canada yet do so for provincial elections.

Canada: NDP gives up: convention cyber attacker remains a mystery | CBC News

The source of the cyber attack that disrupted voting at the NDP’s leadership convention in March remains a mystery, and further investigation to find out who was responsible has been dropped. The NDP was the victim of what’s known as a distributed denial of service attack when thousands of members were trying to vote online throughout the day on March 24. These kinds of attacks result in websites crashing or slowing down because the server is flooded with bogus requests for access. Legitimate voters couldn’t access the NDP’s website to vote and organizers ended up extending the time allotted for each voting round, delaying the final result until hours after it was expected. Thomas Mulcair was finally declared the winner at about 9 p.m. Scytl Canada, the company contracted to run the voting, quickly detected what was going on soon after voting began that day and reacted accordingly. They were able to keep the voting going by increasing the system’s capacity and by blocking some of the bogus IP addresses. Scytl, an international company based in Spain, conducted a forensic analysis after the convention but came up dry when trying to pinpoint exactly who was behind the co-ordinated campaign. “They weren’t able to locate the ultimate source of where this was all programmed,” said Chantal Vallerand, acting director of the NDP.

Canada: Quebec’s election: None of the above, please | The Economist

Politicians aren’t supposed to want summer elections. Voters are distracted and campaign workers are on holiday. Moreover, this year the Olympics are dominating the news. But for Jean Charest, the unpopular Liberal premier of Quebec (pictured in effigy above), an under-the-radar campaign represents his best chance of winning a fourth term. It was thus no surprise that on August 1st he called an election to be held on September 4th—long before it is required by December 2013. The rest of Canada will be watching closely. Although the Canadian economy has weathered the global recession well—it grew by 2.8% between 2008 and 2011, compared with just 1.1% in the United States—it owes its resilience mostly to the energy and commodity boom in the country’s four western provinces, where unemployment is only 5.5%. In contrast, it is 7.9% in the six eastern provinces, which rely on manufacturing and services, and 7.7% in Quebec. Home to nearly a quarter of Canada’s people, Quebec will test whether the country’s manufacturing base can recover, even as oil exports bolster the currency.

Canada: Quebec election called after months of protests | WDRB

Saying it is time for Quebec’s “silent majority” to express itself in a year marked by massive and sometimes violent student protests, Premier Jean Charest announced Wednesday his province would head to the polls in early September. Charest will be seeking a fourth mandate as premier of the French-speaking province in the Sept. 4 election. Polls have shown his party closely trailing the opposition, separatist Parti Quebecois. Quebec does not have set election dates. Charest said Quebec’s people don’t recognize themselves in the violent acts perpetrated by the demonstrators, which he said caused economic and social turbulence. More than 2,500 people have been arrested since protests began over rising tuition fees in February in what became Canada’s most sustained protests ever. Charest also criticized the PQ’s embrace of the protest movement.

Canada: Voting rights at stake in overturned election case, Supreme Court told | The Chronicle Herald

The voting rights of people in the Toronto riding of Etobicoke Centre were trampled by simple record-keeping errors, the Supreme Court of Canada heard Tuesday. The decision to overturn Conservative MP Ted Opitz’s win in last year’s federal election disenfranchised all the voters whose ballots were thrown out, his lawyer said. “It’s hard to think that a constitutional right of this importance can hang by so fine a thread,” lawyer Kent Thomson told the court. Opitz won the riding by just 26 votes over Liberal Borys Wrzesnewskyj in last year’s federal election. But Wrzesnewskyj went to court, claiming procedural irregularities. Earlier this year, an Ontario Superior Court judge found that Elections Canada officials made clerical errors at the polls. After Justice Thomas Lederer threw out 79 votes and overturned the final result, Opitz appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

Canada: Nova Scotia Business Inc. invests $800,000 in Dartmouth e-voting company | The Chronicle Herald

A Dartmouth electronic voting company is looking to increase its share of the national market, and has received a funding boost from the province. Nova Scotia Business Inc. announced Friday that it has submitted a venture capital investment of $800,000 to Intelivote Systems Inc., located in Burnside Park. Dean Smith, company president and founder, said Intelivote has signed up 15 of the 16 municipalities in Nova Scotia that will be offering telephone and Internet voting in municipal elections this fall., including Digby, Yarmouth, Kentville and Truro. Barcelona-based Scytl Secure Electronic Voting is handling the election in Halifax Regional Municipality.

Canada: Federal court hears motions on overturning elections because of robocalls | canada.com

The Federal Court is hearing preliminary motions today in the Council of Canadians’ bid to have the federal election results overturned in a handful of tightly contested ridings. The council has asked the court to review the May 2011 election results in seven ridings where Conservative MPs narrowly won their seats. The council alleges misleading or harassing phone calls in those ridings kept some people from voting and may have affected the outcomes. But the Conservative party claims the group is more concerned with attacking them and raising money than getting to the bottom of the so-called robocalls affair.

Canada: First Nation protesters ‘trampled’ on voting rights: British Columbia officials | Edmonton Journal

Federal Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan has joined the B.C. government and the B.C. Treaty Commission in expressing disappointment with the weekend postponement of a treaty ratification vote involving B.C.’s Tla’amin First Nation. The vote was put off Saturday after a group of protesters used their vehicles to block access to the polling station at the community near Powell River, about 130 kilometres northwest of Vancouver. “It is disappointing that the vote was disrupted due to these actions,” Duncan said in a statement Monday, using much more tempered language than his B.C. counterparts. “Our government believes that a person’s right to vote should not be denied, and we hope that community members use the democratic process to express their agreement or disagreement with the proposed treaty.”

Canada: Nova Scotia town approves online voting bylaw | The Vanguard

The Municipality of Argyle has voted to approve a bylaw that paves the way for electronic and telephone voting in this October’s municipal elections. The municipality held a public hearing on the bylaw prior to its June 12 meeting, although the hearing didn’t attract any members of the public. In the upcoming fall vote there will be no paper ballots in the Municipality of Argyle, but there will still be some polling stations. The Town of Yarmouth, which is also going strictly with electronic (computer) and telephone voting, also won’t have paper ballots in this fall’s vote. The town will have one polling station set up at the town hall with computers and telephones, and at which people can get assistance, if required, to vote.

Canada: Cities pondering move to online voting | Edmonton Journal

Edmonton, St. Albert and Strathcona County want to push ahead with Alberta’s first test of Internet voting during next year’s civic election. The three communities are interested in allowing people who can’t reach a regular polling booth to vote online instead of mailing in their ballots, according to a report released Thursday. The move requires a change to the provincial Local Authorities Election Act, and though Alberta Municipal Affairs is interested, it needs letters of support from councillors before it will act.

Canada: Canada wants this French election hushed up | The Globe and Mail

On Saturday, Canada saw its quietest election ever. It was the don’t ask, don’t tell election. Thousands of French citizens in Canada voted to choose a member of France’s National Assembly representing North America, in the first round of legislative elections. But Canada, alone among the world’s nations, objected to the election in the first place and said it shouldn’t be held on Canadian soil. Having someone represent Canada in another country’s parliament infringes on our sovereignty, Ottawa has decided. They don’t want rough foreign politics in our genteel streets. The French went ahead and Canada couldn’t stop it, so they made a deal with the French government: Have your election, but keep it quiet. The campaigning, heading to a second-round vote on June 16, is being done mostly through social media and in private places. It was a trade-off, but a worthless one. It showed Canada can’t stop foreign elections here. And it was yet more proof there really isn’t much point in trying. Canada is the only country in the world that objects. It’s time to get over it. Globalization is here. The trend will grow as more people spend time outside their native lands and many countries seek to have their diasporas vote.

Canada: Tories ask court to toss election challenge | Ottawa Citizen

The Conservative party has asked a court to toss out a series of legal challenges that are attempting to overturn the results from seven ridings in the last federal election, saying the litigation offers no solid evidence that anyone was denied the right to vote. The Conservative candidates who won the seats also claim in motions that the legal action, brought by the citizen advocacy group Council of Canadians, was filed well beyond the 30-day time limit. Citing a pattern of misleading telephone calls made before the May 2 vote, the council in March asked the Federal Court of Canada to set aside the results in seven ridings across the country, a move that would trigger a series of by-elections. Under the Elections Act, any voter can challenge a result by bringing evidence to court showing that electoral fraud or other improprieties affected the result in a riding.

Canada: Law stripping voting rights from Canadian ex-pats unconstitutional, legal challenge argues | National Post

A law stripping voting rights from more than a million expatriate Canadians who have lived abroad for more than five years should be struck down as unconstitutional, according to a legal challenge served on the federal government Tuesday. The new application, filed in Ontario Superior Court on behalf of two Canadians living in the United States, argues the five-year rule in the Canada Elections Act is arbitrary and unreasonable. “I was very surprised to learn that I have no voting rights, that I have no capacity to interact with my government formally, that there’s no one representing me,” said Gillian Frank, 33, who works in Brooklyn, N.Y. “My sense of being disenfranchised and the fundamental unfairness of it all motivated me (to file the suit).”

Canada: Toronto riding’s election result tossed by judge | CBC News

Conservative MP Ted Opitz’s 2011 federal election win in Etobicoke Centre was declared null and void today in a challenge by former Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj. Opitz won the May 2011 election by 26 votes, but Wrzesnewskyj challenged the results over voting irregularities. The case required more than 26 votes be thrown out for it to be declared void. Conservative Party spokesman Fred Delorey said they’re disappointed with the court decision after 52,000 people in Etobicoke Centre “followed the rules, cast their ballots and today had their democratic decision thrown into doubt.”

Canada: Online voting system mulled in Alberta | Sherwood Park News

Strathcona County council gave its thumbs up at a meeting on April 24 to a partnership with the City of Edmonton and the City of St. Albert to establish an internet voting pilot project for the 2013 municipal election. Jacqueline Roblin, manager of Strathcona County Legislative and Legal Services (LLS), stated in her presentation to council that the pilot would be applied to solely the special ballot process for those people who will be absent from the jurisdiction during the 2013 election. She noted that administration wants to add an amendment allowing for any voter to vote through this process. “We’re taking it in a very small portion of our election so that we can test out our systems and that will gradually start to build voter confidence in the process,” Roblin said.

Canada: U.S. voter fraud convict calls Canada’s robocall scandal ‘sophisticated’ | Montreal Gazette

A Republican political operative who spent three months in an American prison for making illegal political calls says that fraudulent calls in the last Canadian election are likely an American import. In his 2008 book How to Rig an Election, Allen Raymond tells the story of his 10-year political career, which ended abruptly when he was convicted of jamming the New Hampshire Democrats’ phone bank during a Senate election. When the FBI closed in, officials on the Republican National Committee cut off Raymond, and rather than face 25 years in prison, he co-operated with the investigation. Raymond, who now works in Washington as a lobbyist for a labour organization, suspects whoever made illegal voter-suppression calls in Canada in the last election likely learned their dirty tricks south of the border.

Canada: Elections Canada may roll out Internet voting in 2015 in spite of security concerns | CottageCountryNow

While Huntsville council tackles election topics such as ward boundaries, some residents believe the issue of electronic voting should be the primary concern. Grant Hallman, a retired resident who spent a career in software development, has said council’s decision to discuss in 2013 whether electronic voting or traditional paper ballots will be used in the 2014 municipal election will not give the municipality enough time for thorough debate. Hallman said it will likely not give the municipality enough time to switch back to paper ballots if council decides it does not want to use the telephone and Internet voting method used in the previous municipal election. There are several concerns Hallman and others have with the electronic voting method.

Canada: Poll shows Liberal, NDP supporters targeted for vote-suppression calls | canada.com

A poll being released Tuesday morning by the Council of Canadians shows a pattern of misleading election calls targeting opposition supporters in the seven ridings where the organization is seeking new elections. The poll, conducted April 13-19 by Ekos Research Associates, found that Liberal, NDP and Green party supporters in the seven ridings were more much more likely to report receiving a telephone call late in the election directing them to the wrong polling station than Conservative supporters, or opposition supporters in other ridings.

Canada: Deliberate Denial of Service Assault Disrupts NDP Internet Voting | SPAMfighter

An advanced cyber-assault, which created chaos during the federal NDP party’s election, has been attributed to a specialized Web hacker who utilized over 10,000 PCs globally for so slackening the pace of the online-voting that it started to crawl, thus published vancouversun.com dated March 28, 2012. Actually, according to the provider of the Internet-based balloting, Scytl Canada, one Denial-of-Service assault was deliberately unleashed with the objective of disrupting the voting exercise by the NDP on 24th March 2012. It was determined that the assault successfully clogged the channel of the voting mechanism so voters had to wait long to gain access. This slackening of the voting speed thus frustrated the party’s representatives gathered at Toronto.

Canada: Internet voting carries risk as show by NDP experience | thestar.com

The recent New Democratic Party convention in Toronto may have done more than just select Thomas Mulcair as the party’s new leader. It may have also buried the prospect of online voting in Canada for the foreseeable future. While Internet-based voting supporters have consistently maintained that the technology is safe and secure, the NDP’s experience — in which a denial of service attack resulted in long delays and inaccessible websites — demonstrates that turning to Internet voting in an election involving millions of voters would be irresponsible and risky. As voter turnout has steadily declined in recent years, Elections Canada has focused on increasing participation by studying Internet-based voting alternatives. The appeal of online voting is obvious. Canadians bank online, take education courses online, watch movies online, share their life experiences through social networks online, and access government information and services online. Given the integral role the Internet plays in our daily lives, why not vote online as well? The NDP experience provides a compelling answer.

Canada: NDP internet vote disruption worries experts | The Chronicle Herald

Although many people are attached at the hip to their laptops, few are conversant in software coding and even fewer are familiar with heavy encryption. Combine computers with the intricacies of elections, and that leaves only a handful of specialists worldwide who can claim to understand online voting. Questions about e-voting were raised after the NDP leadership convention was disrupted by a cyber attack. Not all of them have been answered satisfactorily, say software experts, despite reassurances from Scytl, the software company that handled the NDP election process, and from Halifax Regional Municipality, which has committed to use the company’s services in October’s municipal election. “Multibillion-dollar (software developers) like Windows, you know, Microsoft . . . can’t have their software bug-free. So I don’t think Scytl is able to do that,” said Daniel Sokolov, a Halifax information technology expert. Sokolov has examined several European elections that used e-voting and found at least three with troubling results.

Canada: More than 10,000 IP addresses used in attack on NDP vote | CTV Winnipeg

The company that ran the online voting system used to help choose the winner of the weekend’s NDP leadership race is now blaming several hours of delays on a “malicious, massive” attack on its voting system. In a news release, Barcelona-based Scytl said “well over 10,000 malevolent IP addresses” were used in a Distributed Denial of Service attack, which generated hundreds of thousands of false voting requests to the system. “We deeply regret the inconvenience to NDP voters caused by this malicious, massive, orchestrated attempt to thwart democracy,” Susan Crutchlow, general manager of Scytl Canada said in a statement. The attack effectively “jammed up the pipe” into the voting system, delaying voter access, the statement said. “This network of malevolent computers, commonly known as a ‘botnet,’ was located on computers around the world but mainly in Canada.”

Canada: Halifax Regional Municipality to review e-voting contract after cyber attack on NDP leadership election | Metro

The Halifax Regional Municipality will be reviewing a decision to award a Spanish e-voting company a contract for this October’s election. This in the wake of e-voting delays that plagued the federal NDP leadership convention in Toronto on Saturday. Scytl, the Spanish company that oversaw the convention’s e-voting, was awarded a contract in January to provide electronic voting for the upcoming HRM election. “With the events of the weekend … we certainly will be reviewing the situation with the company,” Mayor Peter Kelly said on Sunday. “(HRM will) determine whether or not this was an issue of just malfunction, or other factors as was indicated (by the NDP).”