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Electronic Voting

The modern conservative movement is skeptical of electronic voting. Electronic voting systems sacrifice transparency for ease of counting; they can be "less secure" in that sense, although they can be beneficial, in particular for complex votes such as ranked ballots and multiple ballot questions or when addressing issues like cost or voting distance.
To better understand the pros and cons of electronic voting it is useful to first describe ideal paper ballot systems, then identify the unique benefits and challenges that come with transitioning to electronic voting.
Voting systems based on a secret ballot generally try to ensure:
When we talk about "secure" voting we are generally concerned about the first two points but I think it's important to also include the third point. Mathematically speaking, every vote that can't be cast is equal in value to a vote that was improperly cast.
For paper ballots we have a really good set of mechanisms that work together to maximize addressing all three of these above requirements.
The foundation of our ability to trust that an election's votes were counted properly rests on the idea of scrutineers. Elections are typically run between candidates, each with a vested interest in winning. Each candidate has a campaign team with people they trust who are allowed to observe the vote and make sure everything is done fairly. Because everyone with a vested interest in an election gets to have a person or persons on-site to watch all aspects of the vote, it's simply not possible to sneak in or remove ballots illegally - the candidates' scrutineers are paying too much attention for things to slip past them.
For an election to be properly secured, the different moving parts need to be visible from start to finish. In an ideal (from the perspective of security) paper ballot system, this works as follows:
Scrutineers are allowed to observe the entire process from start to finish to ensure no ballots are incorrectly cast. At the end of this process the scrutineers will know exactly how many people were given ballots to cast.
Throughout this process there can be various minor challenges - a lost ballot, voters with less-than-optimal ID, contentious spoiled or ambiguously filled in ballots, and so forth. Details of how these problems are solved are beyond the scope of this response but suffice it to say that campaign teams have ways of legally addressing issues and the number of contentious ballots is generally very, very low. Again, security isn't the only consideration; it's as important to avoid disenfranchising legitimate voters as it is to prevent illegitimate voters.
Long story short, if you follow this process you ensure that votes are anonymous and that scrutineers can verify the fairness of the vote without affecting voter anonymity.
The main purpose of electronic voting allows the counting process to be done more efficiently. The downside ends up being that electronic mechanisms make scrutineering harder. It's not currently possible for scrutineers to see inside electronic counting hardware so there needs to be some way to ascertain that the hardware is doing what it's supposed to.
While it may seem like counting paper ballots is simple enough for this to not be a huge concern, ranked ballots and ballots with multiple questions can make it more valuable to add an electronic component.
For example, a few years back my city had an election where there were four ballot initiative questions, two full sets of school board trustees with a dozen candidates each (public and separate school system - voter picks which one to vote for), six councillors out of a possible 30 candidates and a mayor with four candidates. (I'm going from memory here so forgive a few inaccuracies but that's a reasonable rough description.) It may be possible to count all of these manually but it's certainly a lot of work; having a machine do the brunt of the effort is a real benefit.
While it will always be easier to validate a purely paper voting process there are ways to be reasonably certain that electronic ballots were properly counted. For example, if you are using an electronically counted paper ballot, the simplest would be to allow all candidates to pick a small number of polls for manual recounts; if the recounts match the machine count for those polls, you can be fairly certain that the machine is doing the job it should do (while it's possible that the chosen polls might not be ones that are tampered with, it would be incredibly risky to attempt such a tampering when you don't know which poll will be chosen).
Another mechanism is using an electronic technology provider that is trusted because of effective third party review. This is a bit tricky but it comes down to all of the candidates having general faith that the electronic systems being used are inherently secure. While this seems like unreasonable faith, we actually use it all the time; for example, we expect our food supply is generally safe because a third party is validating its safety.
Ultimately the security gap between electronic and paper ballots comes down to implementation details; so the real answer depends on the jurisdiction and how they plan to implement the ballot. That being said, in my view there are circumstances where complex ballot questions might justify any perceived or real loss of security.
Take, for example, our current plenary voting system. This is a great example of how a very inexpensive and secure voting system winds up costing the voters in terms of both real travel costs as well as the cost of disenfranchisement.
At a UCP AGM the policy and governance updates are traditionally voted on in-person with everyone having a green or red "yes/no" card; when a vote is called you hold up the card associated with your position. Close votes are hand-counted but most votes are carried with enough of a margin to tell the winner or loser by simple visual inspection.
From a security perspective this system has pros and cons. We completely miss out on anonymity (we can all see each other's votes, which carries the threat of social pressure to vote one way or another) but we also can be completely confident in the result because we see every vote in real time (and in living colour, given the flashy red/green cards handed out to plenary participants).
Unfortunately, this comes at a cost of hundreds of dollars per participant, as well as potentially multiple days' worth of time once you accommodate cross-province travel. The security of this voting process has a very real cost to the members.
Compare this with an electronic system - what would we gain and what would we lose if we allowed members to vote remotely via computer?
One significant problem might be that one would have to essentially trust the electronic system as there is no natural scrutineer in a plenary vote. In theory, one could argue that the proponents of resolutions might want to ensure that their resolution got a fair hearing. However, it's also reasonable to suggest that there's no significant incentive to prevent a resolution from passing. Who would be willing to defraud plenary voters by fixing the electronic voting system, especially when MLAs have no obligation to act on problematic or controversial parts of the policy handbook?
Of course, this is a judgment call like any other, and ultimately we have to decide whether we are willing to expand what tools we use to allow voting. In the context of electronic voting the question becomes clear: are we willing to allow mechanisms that are less verifiable but that allow everyone to participate at far less personal cost?