I would never vote in a NZ online election. Ever.
The Front Page podcast: Why online voting is coming for local elections, ready or not
Each week The Front Page takes you behind the scenes of the biggest story from the New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB. Today it’s miniscule numbers of people voting in local elections, and what needs to change. Hosted by Frances Cook.
Local body elections are closing this weekend, but are already marred by plummeting voter turnout in many areas.
At the last available count, 22.6 per cent of Auckland’s voters have had a say.
Meanwhile in Wellington, as of Wednesday, only 25.4 per cent have cast a vote.
Some, even the Prime Minister herself, are suggesting this means it’s time for online voting.
Stealing a hard-copy election is surprisingly difficult and very hard to hide. Stealing an on-line election, however, is a much easier proposition. If it’s done properly, no one but the people who paid for the hack will ever know.
…because of the ease of hacking online voting machines, any NZ election that adopts online voting would mean I would never vote again.
If the result is open to hacking, participation is a democratic pretence for legitimisation & I won’t participate in that farce
Yes martyn you are correct 100%
Global control over election using electronic tabulation is now in jeopardy as corrupt Billionaire George Soros has ownership of a company now counts all global elections and he can change any result if he doesn’t like a country’s policy’s.
The issue is everything in electronic tabulation is controlled by a “source code” that is a key opening and controlling the algorithms used in the program that is used during the counting of the electronic returns.
As the “source code is ‘owned by the program producer (soros) no-one can get access to it to go though the counting again to find any false changes that may have been done.
10% change can be made simply using access with the course code we are told.
So we need to keep the VVPAT (paper backup file to check for false evidence of counting voting in marginal elections.
VVPAT= Voter-verified paper audit trail
Voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) or verifiable paper record (VPR) is a method of providing feedback to voters using a ballotless voting system. A VVPAT is intended as an independent verification system for voting machines designed to allow voters to verify that their vote was cast correctly, to detect possible election fraud or malfunction, and to provide a means to audit the stored electronic results. It contains the name of the candidate and symbol of the party/individual candidate.
Voter-verified paper audit trail – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter-verified_paper_audit_trail
In India, the voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) system was introduced in 8 of 543 parliamentary constituencies as a pilot project in 2014 Indian general election. VVPAT was implemented in Lucknow, Gandhinagar, Bangalore South, Chennai Central, Jadavpur, Raipur, Patna Sahib and Mizoram constituencies.
It’s not just the pervasive threat of hacking/tampering, but any software program of sufficient complexity *will* contain bugs/defects/coding errors/vulnerabilities simply through human errors or oversight or evolving technology
Kia ora Martyn
Congratulations on setting out the condition upon which you would join with the 70% of New Zealanders who do not participate in the colonial regime’s local body electoral system, and the half of New Zealanders who choose not to vote in parliamentary elections.
There is no doubting that it is easier to pervert electronic elections than paper based ones.
As noted above the risk of electronic fraud can be significantly reduced by paper verification of individual votes, but that comes at the cost of compromising the secret ballot. If the voter’s identity and his vote are linked at any point in the algorithm, then state agencies will be able to determine how each voter chose to cast their vote.
It would seem odd to have a system in which the SIS and GCSB know how you voted, but your family, friends, neighbours and workmates did not.
I would do away altogether with the relatively modern innovation of the secret ballot, which is a major hindrance and impediment to genuine democracy, but it should be replaced by a truly open ballot, not by a secret ballot to which the state security agencies have privileged access.
However the technical details of the system are not the direct cause of declining participation in the electoral system.
People simply know that their vote will change nothing, that the politicians do not represent them and that the regime is not responsible to them in any meaningful way. They (and that “they” includes many of the 30%-50% who do actually vote) know that the system is fundamentally flawed and fraudulent.
If it does come to the point that you also withdraw your support from the regime by ceasing to vote, and presumably cease urging others to vote, then I hope that it will be on broader grounds than you have laid out here.
Most people still know what the post is about, they still have a letter box and get mail now and then. If they cannot bother reading the voter info they get by post, they will not do so online either. It is BS to think that we get better outcomes by online voting. We may even get spur of the moment emotional votes that are not good. So stick with postal and personal on site voting, thanks, all else will not bring any improvements.
If people cannot bother, then there is something wrong with the candidates and system as a whole, not with the voting system.