Citizen A with Chris Trotter & Selwyn Manning
Issue 1: Who are the winners and losers from the whale oil Len Brown scandal?
Issue 2: The PM claims Labour will allow the SkyCity Casino deal to stand and Cunliffe loses some of his unequivocal language – will SkyCity get away with their pokies for convention centre deal?
and issue 3 tonight: Is online voting really the way to increase democratic participation?
If the Military might of the greatest power in the history of humanity …the Pentagon, can not now or in the past protect their computers from hackers …hackers young and old …how could a thinking person allow any form of voting to be done “on line” ?
How would you ever know the “vote” was not interfered with ?
How do you know it isn’t now?
You can never know for certain, but the amount of checks and balances possible with the paper-based voting system (particularly those held at polling stations) is able to ensure a reasonable degree of confidence in the current system.
If there is any interference with said voting system, it could only be on a very small scale (eg destroying single voting papers/boxes of papers), which would probably leave a paper trail anyways. With electronic formats, as Chris Trotter said, there are ways of performing mass-scale manipulation of votes without there being any real way of comparing true accuracy.
In the case of paper-based voting, it’s also possible to perform a recount if the result is thought to be incorrect. This cannot be done with electronic voting. There’s also no real way to modify someone’s vote using the paper-based system, something which can be done fairly easily electronically.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that either system is completely safe from manipulation, but the fact is that any electronic formats are much more vulnerable and have a much greater potential for large-scale manipulation.
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