City councillors are concerned Edmonton isn’t ready to move ahead with plans to introduce Internet voting in October’s civic election. Although staff have recommended allowing online ballots in advance polls next fall, members of executive committee questioned Monday whether the process is safe. “I’m not 100-per-cent confident in the security of the Internet and never have been, whether it’s my credit card information or my personal address or how I choose to vote,” Coun. Linda Sloan said. “Would that be something you want to put out there in cyberspace?”
The city and its consultants didn’t find any security breaches last September in a mock “jelly bean” election — which asked about favourite jelly bean colours and other fun questions — set up to test the system. The idea was also endorsed by a 17-member citizen jury which studied the issue in November.
Edmonton and several other Alberta municipalities are looking at becoming the first centres in Western Canada to allow Internet votes.
But a distributed denial of service attack last March that slowed computers to a crawl during the federal NDP leadership race raised fears about the potential for hackers to interfere with electronic voting.
While Coun. Karen Leibovici feels online elections are the way of the future, she’s not sure the city can be ready to introduce this approach in less than nine months.
“We can’t go ahead and have an election where the results might have been tampered with.”
Full Article: Edmonton city councillors wary of online voting.