âoeeventuallyâ it is what we will all us (Score 1)

As one of the few people on this site who has actually created an internet based voting and registration system (mine was for the US government) I have a few opinions based on my experience. First, online voting has already been tried by a number of countries, including the UK (the island didnâ(TM)t sink afterward), and found to not increase voter turnout. So if their goal is to increase voter turnout they might want to consider encouraging candidates who the populace finds interesting rather than trying a technology fix. Second, most paper or mechanical based systems are so broken that theoretically internet voting should be better. In practice the broken parts of the current systems are codified in law and so the Internet equivalent systems end up being as bad or worse than the paper/mechanical systems.

Once again based on experience here is what is required for this to work:

1. Laws in the country that actually support building effective secure systems
2. Visibility into the process of building the system and open code review (notice I did not specify open source though it is a possibility)
3. A national ID with a machine readable electronic identifier built into the ID
4. A willingness by the populace to use the system
5. A number of test runs of the system where voting is done on a topic that is interesting but will not affect the operation of the government
6. A secure platform to do the voting over (aka your pc is not secure and this by the way is most difficult part)
7. A long voting period so that DOS attacks cannot completely disable the system

So there are actually a bunch more things that need to be considered but this list will get you a long way down the road. And yes Internet based voting will eventually win out even with all of its detractors and problems. So cheers to Canada for giving it a go!