British Columbia had an Independent Panel on Internet Voting, whose report was submitted in February 2014. The report is a comprehensive review of the topic. It recommends against Internet voting for provincial and municipal elections.
1. Do not implement universal Internet voting for either local government or provincial government elections at this time.
It also provides an excellent list of criteria against which any Internet voting system should be evaluated, and indicates that these principles must be met in addition to any standards a technical committee would establish.
Accessibility
The Internet voting process must be readily available to, and usable by, all voters eligible to vote by Internet voting, even in the presence of Internet voting-specific threats.
Ballot anonymity
The voting process must prevent at any stage of the election the ability to connect a voter and the ballot(s) cast by the voter.
Individual and independent verifiability
The voting process will provide for the voter to verify that their vote has been counted as cast, and for the tally to be verified by the election administration, political parties and candidate representatives.
Non-reliance on trustworthiness of the voter’s device(s)
The security of the Internet voting system and the secrecy of the ballot should not depend on the trustworthiness of the voter’s device(s).
One vote per voter
Only one vote per voter is counted for obtaining the election results.
This will be fulfilled even in the case where the voter is allowed to cast their vote on multiple occasions (in some systems, people can cast their vote multiple times, with only the last one being counted).Only count votes from eligible voters
The electoral process shall ensure that the votes used in the counting process are the ones cast by eligible voters.
Process validation and transparency
The procedures, technology, source code, design and implementation details, and documentation of the system must be available in their entirety for free and unconstrained evaluation by anyone for testing and review for an appropriate length of time before, during and after the system is to be used. Policies and procedures must be in place to respond to issues that arise. Appropriate oversight and transparency are key to ensuring the integrity of the voting process and facilitating stakeholder trust.
Service availability
The election process and any of its critical components (e.g., voters list information, cast votes, voting channel, etc.) will be available as required to voters, election administrators, observers or any others involved in the process. If Internet voting should become unavailable or compromised, alternative voting opportunities should be available.
Voter authentication and authorization
The electoral process will ensure that before allowing a voter to cast a vote, that the identity of the voter is the same as claimed, and that the voter is eligible to vote.
Above from Independent Panel on Internet Voting – Recommendations Report to the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia – February 2014 (PDF) – principles are specifically from Recommendation 4
All Internet voting systems currently in use in Canada fail to meet one or more of these principles. In particular, the systems used for municipal voting in Ontario and Nova Scotia are provided by third-party private for-profit vendors, and do not provide any of the process validation and transparency described above.
Paper Vote Canada 2 