Prince Edward Island (PEI) – 2016 Plebiscite on Democratic Renewal – Voting Integrity Audit Report – from the Independent Technical Panel on Voting Integrity (ITPVI) – November 30, 2016
This report is Section 3 Appendix in the 2016 Annual Report of the Chief Electoral Officer of PEI (PDF), starting on page 35.
Section 11 of the Voting Integrity Audit Report is Considerations for Applying E-Voting Options [Internet voting] in Canadian Public Elections.
The report recommends against Internet voting at the federal and provincial levels, except for absentee voters.
There is a need to maintain an acute level of awareness of the risks to electoral integrity that these new voting methods present. The implications of a breach of the public trust that exists today suggests strongly that internet and telephone voting in Canadian provincial and federal parliamentary elections be considered channels that should be limited to use only by absentee voters for the immediate foreseeable future. …
It is important that leaders in Canadian electoral administration manage public expectations and articulate their concerns about the fact that a perfectly secure and fool-proof electronic voting system does not yet exist.
This recommendation was picked up in the news media, e.g. CBC News PEI – Online voting not ready for federal, provincial election: officials – May 4, 2017.
The group concluded a high-stakes provincial or federal election could attract groups looking to intervene in illicit ways through cyber-attacks, hacking or other means.
The report also does an excellent job of showing the “additional risks and controls associated with online electronic voting” [Internet voting]. These include (highlighting by me):
1. Trusted digital voter identification and authentication is a requisite additional control. An irrefutable digital identity is the first safeguard in ensuring that eligible voters can vote (and can vote only once), and in ensuring that ineligible voters are not permitted to vote. Establishing this identity with a robust ‘shared secret’ is a mandatory prerequisite.
2. The onus is on the buyers, designers, developers, maintainers and operators of any electronic voting system to demonstrate rigor in the specifications, certifications, accreditations, testing and operation of the e-voting system to ensure it is able to mitigate the full range of risks to a reasonable and acceptable level. This has to be achieved to a level of satisfaction regarding both hardware and software risk mitigation. The remaining level of risk needs to be accepted by all stakeholders.
3. With the elimination of the controls that were previously implemented in manually controlled voting processes (refer Appendix ‘G’: Controls C1 – C5), traditional risks are not as fully mitigated as before. In fact, the following risks are difficult to mitigate in any meaningful way:
a. Vote buying / vote secrecy (“I’ll just take a selfie in front of my screen”)
b. Voter coercion (Unless reported, it is impossible to determine if a vote is being coerced)
4. The risk of a voter voting with stolen credentials can only be partially mitigated by effective voters list management and the implementation of a trusted digital voter identification and authentication scheme. Digital voter identification must be robust, but it must also be easily managed so as not to become a barrier to voting because it is overly complex for a voter to use as seldom as once every four years.
5. The additional risks of compromised end-user hardware or software, or a broad regional or national attack on internet infrastructure, remain unmitigated.
The report also identifies the extremely high standard to which we must hold Internet voting, as the transparency provided by conducting paper ballot voting and counting in public are lost when using completely computerized processes. Highlighting added by me.
The onus is also completely on the online electronic voting system implementer to ensure that controls are established within the e-voting system that meet the legislative requirements of the jurisdiction, and provide an adequate level of transparency for all stakeholders. Simply depositing electronic votes into a ‘black-box’ where they are stored and counted is unlikely to meet stakeholder demands for maintaining a high level of public confidence, unlikely to publicly show that voting risks are continuing to be
managed responsibly, and unlikely to prove to candidates and political parties that the electoral process and controls continue to deliver a trusted and accurate result.
SIDEBAR on turnout:
A demonstration of the reality of Internet voting turnout was the 2016 Prince Edward Island Plebiscite on Democratic Renewal which had 10 days of online voting in addition to two days of in-person voting. Not only was the overall turnout low at 36.5%, but the turnout for ages 18-24 was the lowest of any age range, at 25.47%.
Numbers from McLeod, G. B. (2016, November 9). Interim Report of the Chief Electoral Officer for the 2016 Plebiscite on Democratic Renewal. http://www.gov.pe.ca/photos/original/elec_demrefpleb.pdf
END SIDEBAR
Paper Vote Canada 2 