Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr K
If
We can secure online banking why not voting? Even a simple change like having voting over weekends would help turnout. There seems to be no real interest in this increasing turnout or concern that the young are increasingly seeing politics as irrelevant.
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We need online voting to be more secure than banking. A General Election conducted via the Internet would be a much bigger target.
Online we would need verification and confidence in each step of the process. That the vote was placed by the voter at the machine, that the vote wasn't changed en-route to the server it arrives at, that the server itself tallies the votes correctly and that it doesn't switch them. That the machine correctly stores votes if it the infrastructure goes down. At the end you need confidence that the 10,000 votes it says it has are actual votes.
It's remarkable how resilient the paper process is. The vote is identifiable each step of the way. The voter gets a paper, they place the ballot into a locked box, the box is opened in full public view, each ballot is a vote and everyone can see what was marked. Very hard to replicate that on computers were there the 'vote' will always be an abstraction of a digital interaction.
I agree about the weekend thing. France have their elections over a weekend, Saturday and Sunday, with the vote revealed Sunday night. I like that system. At the very least election day should be made a bank holiday IMO.