New Zealand: Online system can’t win any votes | Brian Rudman/NZ Herald News

Talk about admitting defeat before the race is over. Instead of trying to inspire voters to get out and do their democratic duty in a few weeks, Local Government Minister Chris Tremain has as good as conceded turn-out is going to be poor. This week, he’s announced a trial of online voting in the 2016 local authority elections as a way “to encourage people to become involved in the democratic process.” Voting via the internet, he says, “will be more convenient and appeal to young voters. It will also make it easier for people with disabilities to vote”. Local Government New Zealand president Lawrence Yule echoed these wishful hopes. But overseas trials don’t appear to back their optimism. In a 2009 poll for the Honolulu Neighbourhood Board, for example, there was an 83 per cent drop in voter participation when Oahu voters had to vote by telephone or internet, rather than cast a paper ballot. But even if internet voting was served up as another option, alongside postal and polling booth voting, and did prove to be a hit with the young, there’s no evidence to suggest your e-vote will be safe and secure as it wings its way from your laptop to Election Central, or that when it arrives, it won’t be prey to malware, or direct external interference.

New Zealand: Can we trust voting online? | ZDNet

Thankfully, the New Zealand government appears not to be pressing ahead with online voting — at least, for now. An Electoral Amendment Bill was released yesterday, which improves online registration through its RealMe identification service, but nothing appears to have been said about actual online voting itself. Voting online was always seen as one of those inevitable things as part of an e-transition, as it were, to an online world; something that we all saw as “a good thing”. But recent events have made me turn against such “progress”. Having free and fair elections are fundamental to the democratic process, but can we trust such e-ballots?

Canada: Cost, security dampen online voting enthusiasm in London | Metro

Leamington residents will be able to cast ballots in their next municipal election by doing nothing more than tapping a mouse from the comfort of their own home. But Londoners may have to wait a while before they get that luxury. Leamington’s decision to allow online voting was based on a number of factors, officials say, not the least of which was the opportunity to reverse a trend in many municipalities of voter apathy. London city clerk Cathy Saunders wouldn’t rule out a similar move locally for the 2014 election, but said there are many questions that have to be answered before a go-ahead could be given. “We still remain somewhat concerned with the online voting,” she said. “We still have some security concerns.”

Canada: Online voting: the ultimate hackers’ challenge | Toronto Star

“Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.” So goes the famous quote. Without very careful study, you might get the wish of Internet voting — and live to regret it. Your birth certificate and passport are “foundation” documents. You have to show up to get them. You have to show up to get married, and you should have to show up to cast a ballot, both “foundation” activities. Internet voting advocates assume away the large risks — and certainty of abuse — of online voting, not to mention the difficulty and expense of developing the system. There is no audit trail in an online vote. Physical ballot boxes are sealed in the presence of human witnesses. The individual ballots can be recounted to determine by sight the voter’s intention. The sheer number of human beings physically watching voters makes the integrity of the ballot box difficult to breach, though people try to cheat in every election. Online voting would be used just once every four years. There is no opportunity to properly debug the system when it goes awry on election day, or between elections, or stress-test the system to determine if it stands up to the server traffic. Enersource’s web servers went down during the July rain storm power outage in the GTA. People got their information from Facebook and Twitter. Hackers thrive in the years of dark time between scheduled elections. Proponents of online voting point to the ubiquitous use of online banking and other daily Internet transactions. The critical difference is that those other systems are used, debugged, watched and stress-tested each and every day by scores of experts who know them inside out. Gaining access to the software’s root directory enables a hacker to control the system on election day, and corrupt the outcome. By the time voters see the damage, it is too late.

Australia: Queensland moves to have electronic, and potentially online voting, within six years | The Telegraph

Queenslanders who fail to vote in State Elections will continue to cop a fine after the Newman Government decided not to scrap compulsory voting. But the Government will eventually make it more convenient to vote, moving to introduce electronic, and potentially online voting, within six years. Attorney-General Jarrod Bleijie yesterday announced Cabinet had decided against removing fines for voters who fail to show up on polling day. It comes after The Courier-Mail revealed in January the Government was reviewing compulsory voting among other reforms. Other changes include a new requirement for voters to show proof of identification at the polling booth, a move that could affect pensioners.

Australia: Compulsory voting to remain in Queensland as donation cap lifted | The Australian

Compulsory voting will remain in place in Queensland but political parties will have to declare donations of $12,400 or more under reforms announced by the Newman Government today. Online voting could also be trialled in the 2015 campaign for voters with a disability. Attorney-General Jarrod Bleijie said he envisioned all voters could vote electronically within six years. “Subject to appropriate security arrangements and successful trials, computers could replace paper voting cards at polling booths and Queenslanders could even one day vote from the comfort of their own homes over the Internet,” Mr Bleijie said. “The immediate priority is providing electronically assisted voting for people with disabilities.” Other reforms will include lifting the caps on political donations and expenditure which were imposed by the former government and requiring proof of identity from voters on polling day.

Canada: Elections Ontario says it’s time for a pilot project on online voting | Toronto Star

The province should test online voting with a pilot project during a byelection down the road, Elections Ontario recommends.
In a two-part, 271-page report to the legislature tabled Monday, Chief Electoral Officer Greg Essensa said it’s time to embrace technological changes in order to encourage more people to vote. … But there are security and technological challenges to online or telephone voting, he concluded after looking at experiences in Australia, Estonia, the U.S., the United Kingdom and various Canadian municipalities. These include “identifying the need to overcome capacity challenges by building and supporting the infrastructure required to manage a system for the entire province” and understanding that there will be “significant costs associated with pilots and integrating network voting into a general election (more than $2 million per use of the system).”

Switzerland: Genevans abroad given 2 electronic voting dates | GenevaLunch

The cantonal council in Geneva is offering its residents abroad the possibility of voting electronically 6 October and 10 November, only the second time they’ve been given the option to vote electronically. The previous voting sessions in October 2012 were majority votes, but the 6 October will be the first proportional vote done this way. Cantonal councilors underscored their decision by saluting the 14 June decision by the Federal Council to adopt a report on electronic voting that lays out clear guidelines for the cantons. Electronic voting during its first six year test phase was financed by the federal government, but starting this year the cantons are responsible for covering the costs, with some help from Bern until 2014.

Estonia: Alleging Flaws, E-Voting Critics Make Request for 2011 Log Files | ERR

The Center Party, which insists the country’s vaunted electronic voting system is flawed, has made a freedom of information request to the state electoral committee to get e-voting server log files from the 2011 general elections. “In light of our deep doubts about the security of e-elections, we are asking the electoral committee about e-voting software ownership issues and the contracts under which the software was commissioned,” said MP Priit Toobal. Toobal said Center was interested in whether the 2011 e-voting software was audited and if so, what the results of the audit were. Toobal also said the party made a proposal to test the 2013 local election e-voting system and software.

France: Fake votes mar France’s first electronic election | The Independent

Former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s political party, already enfeebled by a chaotic national leadership election last year, faces further ridicule in a Paris town hall primary election which ends tonight. An “online-primary”, claimed as “fraud-proof” and “ultra secure”, has turned out to be vulnerable to multiple and fake voting. The four-day election has also the exposed the poisonous divisions created within the centre-right Union Pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) by the law permitting gay marriage which took effect last week. France’s first “electronic election” had been expected to anoint a rising star of the moderate right, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, 39, as the party’s candidate in the election for mayor of Paris next spring. The former environment minister, known as “NKM”, was runaway favourite to win in the first round  until she abstained in the final parliamentary vote on same-sex marriage in late April. … What was already shaping up as a tense and close election was thrown into utter confusion at the weekend. Journalists from the news site Metronews proved that it was easy to breach the allegedly strict security of the election and vote several times using different names.

Russia: Kremlin ‘outraged’ by electoral fraud… in Eurovision song contest | CSMonitor.com

Russian authorities have finally found a case of alleged voting fraud that they can get really incensed about. No, it’s not the 2011 Duma elections, which experts from across Russia’s political spectrum now agree were probably falsified on a huge scale. That has never been the subject of official outrage, or even investigation. This is something far more important: the continental song competition, Eurovision. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told journalists yesterday that he was “outraged” to learn that the voting system in neighboring Azerbaijan had eliminated the votes cast for Russian Eurovision contestant Dina Garipova in that country. Voters registering their preferences by cellphone had given a second-place finish to Ms. Garipova – which should have given her 10 points in the overall contest – but they had somehow disappeared in the reporting process.

Canada: Liberal Party Holds Online Primaries While Security Experts Scowl | TechPresident

Canada’s Liberal party elected a new leader last week. And for the first time in the party’s history, the voting took place online. Justin Trudeau, the telegenic son of the late Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s most famous prime minister, won in a landslide with over 80 per cent of the vote. But online voting critics say that despite the decisive results, the Internet remains an unsafe place to cast your vote. “If the Conservative party want to select the next Liberal party leader, this provides them with the perfect opportunity,” says Dr. Barbara Simons, an online voting expert, and co-author (with Douglas Jones) of Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count? “I am not saying the Conservatives would do this — I’m just saying this is a very foolish and irresponsible thing for Liberals to be doing, because they open themselves up to vote-rigging that would be almost untraceable, and impossible to prove.”

Canada: Elections Canada drops plan for online voting due to cuts | CBC News

Elections Canada has abandoned plans to experiment with an online voting pilot project before the 2015 general election due to budget cuts. Elections Canada also has concerns about the security of online voting, but a new report indicates that voting irregularities happen frequently at polling stations on voting day even when paper ballots are used. A spokesperson for Elections Canada said Tuesday that experiments with online voting are postponed “for the long term,” and the reasons for the delay are due to an eight per cent budget cut that took effect this year, translating into a loss of $7.5 million per year. A plan to try out online voting in a federal byelection sometime before 2015 has been quashed.

Sweden: Swedes could cast ballots online by 2018 | The Local

Neighbouring Norway and Finland have already done digital voting test runs. Now some Swedish municipalities could follow the trend after a majority of members in the parliamentary election law committee voted in favour of a new proposal. “If it works well, it would be a natural step to introduce it in the 2022 elections,” Billy Gustafsson, Social Dem. … However, the proposal was not met with unanimous approval.

Canada: Online voting pilot squashed by Strathcona council after warning from Province | Sherwood Park News

After what seemed like a possible second chance for an Internet voting pilot project in Strathcona County, council squashed the plan for the upcoming general election, following a warning from the province. On Tuesday, April 9, council approved three recommendations that would effectively send the Internet Voting Pilot project back to the drawing board until the province and the municipality had conducted further research into the plan. According to Jacqueline Roblin from Legislative and Legal Services, the pilot project was first considered by council to be used during the upcoming 2013 general election. “The initial Internet voting pilot that council authorized Strathcona County to participate in was a collaborative effort between Municipal Affairs, Edmonton, St. Albert and Strathcona County to pilot Internet voting in conjunction and forming part of the 2013 general election,” she clarified. After Edmonton and St. Albert dropped out of the pilot project, Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths advised the county that the department would not be supporting the initiative and withdrew the promised funding.

Canada: Liberals receive more than 1,000 calls from members, supporters who couldn’t vote online | The Hill Times

Liberal Party members and supporters had such difficulty with a complicated online voting system as the Liberal leadership election began over the past two days that the party had to beef up its telephone help lines to cope with a flood of calls, party members and a campaign officials say. Campaign phone banks with Liberal MP and candidate Justin Trudeau’s (Papineau, Que.) campaign received more than 1,000 calls from supporters who could not complete the electronic balloting—in part caused by the sequence for entering day and month numbers for birth places by the company conducting the election for the Liberals—and as of Monday afternoon the Liberal website numbers for registered voters in each province did not match the total number of registered voters. The number of registered voters according to the site’s display of provincial totals—represented in a map of Canada on the page displaying the vote results—totalled 125,471. The number of votes cast showed at 37,856. But the aggregate total displayed in a separate line on the website cited a total of 127,122 registered voters.

Pakistan: ‘Prohibitively expensive’: Election Commission opposes online vote for expatriates | The Express Tribune

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) took an unexpected U-turn when it opposed an online voting system for overseas Pakistanis, terming it expensive, time-consuming, and impracticable. In its report submitted to the Supreme Court on Monday, the ECP contended that facilitating eligible overseas Pakistanis to cast their votes in the upcoming general elections was not advisable.
Quoting the unanimous decision of a committee comprising officials from ECP, NADRA and IT ministry, the commission stated that allowing overseas Pakistanis to vote through an uncertified computer system could be disastrous for the electoral process. The Supreme Court had earlier directed the secretaries of law and justice, information technology, foreign affairs, ministry of oversees Pakistanis and the ECP, as well as the chairman NADRA to undertake coordinated efforts for devising a mechanism which would enable overseas Pakistanis to cast their votes in the coming polls.

Canada: Citing budget cuts, Elections Canada delays pilot project on Internet voting | Vancouver Sun

Budget cuts at Elections Canada have pushed a pilot project on Internet voting off the agenda indefinitely. The body that runs Canada’s federal voting had hoped to introduce online voting for byelections held in 2013, in an effort to see whether making voting more convenient would help boost participation. But according to figures in the agency’s recently tabled report on planning and priorities, spending will fall from $84 million in 2012-13 to a forecasted $74 million in 2013-14. “As part of the fiscal reductions taking place across government, we took an eight-per-cent decrease in our budget,” said Diane Benson, an Elections Canada spokesperson. “So a lot of it is focusing on core priorities we have to deliver for the next election.”

Canada: Airdrie can’t offer online voting, says province | Calgary Herald

Thanks to the province’s refusal to allow online municipal election ballots, voting in Airdrie this fall will be as difficult as heading to the nearest poll station and marking Xs on paper. The city of 45,000 people immediately north of Calgary was slated to become Alberta’s first online voting community after council endorsed the idea earlier this year following extensive study and testing. But Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths has scotched the plan for the 2013 civic election, telling Airdrie Mayor Peter Brown in a letter last month he worried e-voting would erode “public confidence” in elections.

Editorials: Building an Election System that Works | Susan K. Urahn/GovTech

President Obama and leaders in both parties, in calling for improving American elections, point to long lines at the polls last year as a significant problem that needs to be solved. And with good reason: Longer wait times can discourage people from voting and fuel the perception that their right to vote is in jeopardy. A post-election poll by the Pew Research Center found that only 55 percent of voters who waited 30 minutes or more to cast a ballot thought that the election was managed “very well,” compared with 79 percent for voters who waited less than a half-hour and 83 percent for voters who had no wait. Long lines, however, are just the tip of iceberg; much more needs to be done. To achieve an election system that is convenient, accurate and fair, state and local leaders need data to review and track their voting processes–from registration to ballot-counting. This kind of analysis is not easy. Our nation’s locally run elections lack a common set of performance measures and a baseline from which reliable comparisons–between election cycles and across jurisdictions-can be made. Accurate data on what leads to better or worse results in any particular area are often scarce.

Canada: Wasaga clerk proposes online, telephone voting | Simcoe

Wasaga Beach is considering a switch to internet and telephone voting for the next municipal election. Council has given town clerk Twyla Nicholson the green light to explore the voting methods and provide additional information to council members. The next municipal election is not until October 2014. If approved, telephone and online voting would replace the touch screen voting terminals used in the last two elections.

Editorials: Internet voting for overseas military puts election security at risk | Pamela Smith/Hartford Courant

Connecticut lawmakers are considering legislation to allow military voters to cast ballots over the Internet. The intention of this legislation is well-meaning — Connecticut does need to improve the voting process for military voters — but Internet voting is not the answer. Every day, headlines reveal just how vulnerable and insecure any online network really is, and how sophisticated, tenacious and skilled today’s attackers are. Just last week, we learned that the U.S. has already experienced our first-ever documented attack on an election system, when a grand jury report revealed that someone hacked into the Miami-Dade primary elections system in August 2012. A chilling account in The Washington Post recently reported that most government entities in Washington, including congressional offices, federal agencies, government contractors, embassies, news organizations, think tanks and law firms, have been penetrated by Chinese hackers. They join a long list that includes the CIA, FBI, Department of Defense, Bank of America, and on and on. These organizations have huge cybersecurity budgets and the most robust security tools available, and they have been unable to prevent hacking. Contrary to popular belief, online voting systems would not be any more secure.

Florida: Miami’s Voter Fraud Is Only the Beginning of Election Hacking | The Atlantic Wire

Authorities have confirmed tor the first time ever, that hackers attempted and almost succeeded at rigging a Miami primary vote, uncovering underlying security issues with the online voting systems of the future. In the Miami-Dade primary election last August, requests for over 2,500 phantom absentee ballots flooded the Miami Dade voter registration site, a phenomenon which a grand jury has now confirmed came from hackers, reports MSNBC’s Gil Aegerter. Because it had some hallmarks of trickery, the election department’s software was able to halt the scheme before it actually affected the election. But, the scarier part is how easy the hack was to perform, as theMiami Herald‘s Patricia Mazzei explains. With a tiny bit more skill, this person could have bypassed the trigger that caught the hack. “And that, of course, is the most frightening thing: that any moderately or even marginally skilled programmer could have done this,” Steven Rambam, who reviewed the IP addresses associated with this hack told Mazzei. So, yeah, this is just the beginning.

Kentucky: Democrats say online voting would be more secure than vulnerable Florida system | The Courier-Journal

As Kentucky Democrats make a last-minute push to allow U.S. military to vote online, Florida is reporting what appears to be the first case of someone trying to manipulate U.S. voting through the Internet. A Miami-Dade County grand jury report reveals Internet requests from computers in locations such as Ireland, England and India sought more than 2,500 absentee ballots during the primary election last August. The report said officials blocked the ballots from going out when they saw “an extraordinary number” of ballot requests from the same group of computers. Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes said her proposal for Kentucky differs from the Florida system, which didn’t require users to sign in with a password. “That example isn’t applicable to what Kentucky is trying to do,” Grimes said. But Candice Hoke, a law professor and director of the Center For Election Integrity at Cleveland State University in Ohio, said the Florida case shows that Internet voting is a potential target and that there may have been other attempts to manipulate the voting that haven’t been uncovered.

Canada: Internet voting not an option in Alberta | Daily Herald Tribune

The Government of Alberta decided last week to pull the plug on proposed pilot projects to make online voting available for advanced polls, citing security concerns as well as initial set-up costs as the main deterrents. Edmonton city council also voted the idea down for the same reasons. “It really is disappointing that the province chose to really react to the decision of Edmonton city council and basically allow Edmonton to drive the determination of what’s going to happen in the rest of the province,” said Mayor Bill Given. The city received its notice through a letter from Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths on March 6.

Canada: Internet voting kiboshed in Airdrie | Local | News | Airdrie Echo

It turns out Airdronians won’t be able to vote online in this year’s municipal election. On Monday, Alberta’s Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths sent word that Internet voting for municipal elections would not be held in Alberta. At least for now. Mayor Peter Brown was notified by Griffiths’ office Monday night that they were pulling the plug on the possibility of allowing municipalities like Airdrie to offer online voting in the 2013 municipal elections. Airdrie city council recently voted to use online voting if it was an option this year. Larger municipalities and their councils, like Edmonton and St. Albert, had scrapped plans to offer Internet voting overwhelmingly, citing high costs and possible fraudulent activity as key concerns during trial runs. “Since we don’t have proven technology yet and there isn’t confidence in the system, we won’t be proceeding,” Griffiths said in an interview with the Echo. “(Voting) is the most important franchise right that any citizen has and you have to make sure it’s never abused.”

Canada: Internet voting a no-go for Strathcona County | Global Edmonton

Residents in Strathcona County will not be using internet voting as an option for the 2013 municipal election. Tuesday afternoon, county councillors were set to vote on whether or not to move ahead with a project that would see online ballots cast as part of the advanced polls in October’s civic election. However, Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths put the brakes on the idea before council had the chance to vote. “I support continued research and experience with internet voting systems, but at this time, I am not prepared to support the use of internet voting for the October 2013 general election,” Griffiths wrote in a letter sent to Strathcona County Mayor, Linda Osinchuk.

Canada: Alberta government withdraws support from online voting | Metro

In the wake of Edmonton’s decision not to go ahead with online voting in the fall campaign, the provincial government has withdrawn its support for the idea as well. Strathcona County, which initially partnered with Edmonton for online voting, was set to vote earlier this week on including it in their election. But Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths wrote the county a letter saying the province would not support the move. “As yet Edmonton and St. Albert didn’t have confidence in the system so we are not going to run a real project where people are actually voting on the internet in this election. It’s too high risk.” he said in an interview. Griffiths said elections have to be completely reliable and he doesn’t believe the technology is there.

Canada: Internet voting decision goes to Strathcona County council Tuesday | Edmonton Journal

Strathcona County council is expected to decide Tuesday if the municipality will proceed with an Internet voting pilot project that could see online ballots cast as part of October’s civic election. It’s the last chance for Internet voting in the capital region, after St. Albert and Edmonton city councils defeated proposals for Internet voting last month. Edmonton city staff tested a proposed online voting system for more than a year, including a mock “jelly bean election” and the verdict of a citizen jury. A report recommended Edmonton allow Internet voting for advance and special ballots in October’s civic election, but councillors worried the process wasn’t entirely secure and defeated the proposal Feb. 6. St. Albert councillors voted to stop work on the project two weeks later.

Editorials: Oscars put online voting problems back in the spotlight | Rep. Rush Holt/NJ.com

The announcement of this year’s Best Picture winner on Sunday will culminate an experiment unprecedented in the 85-year history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. For the first time, Oscar winners will be determined largely by votes cast online. At a time when New Jersey and other states are considering holding more consequential elections over the internet, we should ask: How did the Oscar experiment go? Unfortunately, it went poorly, for reasons that shed light on the inherent difficulty of conducting secure, accessible, credible elections online. Problems for Oscar voters began at the beginning: logging in. Voters were required to create special, complex passwords, but when they tried to log in to the Oscar website, many found their passwords rejected. After re-entering passwords several times, voters were locked out of the site entirely and forced to call a help line. Many then had to wait for new passwords, delivered by snail-mail. Even relatively young and tech-savvy voters weren’t immune. As 42-year-old documentarian Morgan Spurloch told the Hollywood Reporter, “There’s even some young farts like myself that are having problems.”