“Occupy a voting booth” retort to protesters misses the point

I’m the last person to discourage someone from voting and getting involved in the organized political process. I joined a political party at age 16, and I’ve voted in every election I’ve been able to since I turned 18. I want everyone to vote early, and vote often.

But I have to shake my head when I read pieces like “Want real change? Hit the ballot box instead of the streets” from Chantal Hebert and “How about occupying a voting booth?” from David Akin that say if these youngins want real change, they should just go and vote. That strikes me as a reflexive establishment reaction that misses the point, and what is driving and motivating these protesters.

To start, we’ll grant the premise that most of these protesters aren’t regular voters, although that’s by no means a given. Yes, young people vote in low numbers, but they also occupy things in low numbers. It’s not unreasonable to suggest those engaged enough to camp out in a protest tent village may be more likely to be among the percentage of youth that have marked a ballot.

But granting the premise, if these youth really want change, shouldn’t they just go and vote, as Chantal and David suggest? As I said, I’m a big fan of voting, and I absolutely want more Canadians of all ages to get involved in the political process, whether it’s voting, finding candidates they support and helping them or even running themselves.

At the same time though, I can understand why they’d be turned off by the political process, and may see voting as a waste of time choosing between lesser evils that will not lead to any kind of real change, and therefore a waste of time. Many young people, whether they’re occupying something or not, are very concerned about the state of the world and want to make it a better place. Their "give a damn" level is probably higher than the average. But they see organized politics as irrelevant to creating the change they want to see, and so they channel their energy into other forms of activism and advocacy.

Now, there is lots of responsibility to go around here. Part of it does indeed lay with these youngins. If they don’t like the choices on offer, they should go out and find someone they do like or even run themselves. Don’t feel at home in any of the political parties? Pick the one that’s the best fit and work to change it from within, or organize your own group and build a movement with like-minded fellow travelers.

At the same time though, just telling them to go vote is a cop-out. Yes, they should get involved, but we should also reform our political system because, the fact is, it is viewed as irrelevant and ineffective by many Canadians, and not just the young folk. If we want greater engagement by citizens of all ages, we need to start doing something differently.

Off the top of my head, I’d suggest loosening the oppressive yoke of party discipline, empowering individual MPs to have personalities and agendas and represent their constituents and causes, and making the policy development process in political parties actually connected to their election platform instead of an exercise in pointless tedium. For starters.

One suggestion that I know will be made though is online voting, and I have to say it’s not the answer for youth engagement. Young people aren’t voting not because it’s not easy enough, but because it’s not relevant. Online voting may well have merit (I have serious security concerns I’d want addressed first) but just because the kids like smartphones doesn’t make online voting the answer to low youth engagement.

Yes, youth need to vote. But we all need to make it count.

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We’re not ready for online voting

I read today that Elections Canada is considering dipping its toe into the waters of online or e-voting:

Canada's chief electoral officer says he's committed to seeking approval for a test of Internet voting in a byelection held after 2013.

Marc Mayrand also says Elections Canada wants to expand other services offered online, like voter registration.

In his report on the June 2 federal election, Mayrand says it's clear Canadians are demanding more ease and flexibility when it comes to voting.

Let me say first that, on the one hand, it’s positive that an organization that is as culturally-conservative and traditional as Elections Canada is even pondering exploring alternate methods of service delivery is a positive. Some years back I interviewed their CIO a few weeks into the job; he’d come from the private sector and he was floored at the degree of institutional resistance to even minor technological advancement. They had their way of doing things, it was in a big binder, and it was step-by-step. I’m not sure how long he lasted there.

On the other hand, while voter registration seems like an obvious step, I’d have a very hard time trusting Elections Canada to devise a secure and reliable system for online voting when every time I try to use their online contributions database, for example, I want to cry over how unnecessarily complicated and cumbersome they make even simple tasks.

But griping about Elections Canada’s web savvy aside (they’re still better than the Parl.gc.ca folks) I have serious concerns about the idea of online voting, and serious reservations that would need to be addressed before I could consider supporting it.

It’s one of those things that sounds great in theory – vote easily and quickly wherever you are, you don’t need to travel or wait in line – but, upon further reflection, loses some of its luster.

Our current system has the advantage of being direct and personal: you go to your poll, identify yourself, you’re crossed off the list, mark an X on the ballot, then the ballots are counted and a winner tallied If there’s a challenge/recount, we have the physical ballots and we count them.

If we move to an online system, I see a number of problems:

*How do we know who that anonymous person is behind the computer screen is? Online systems usually involve a token or PIN sent to the mailing address of the registered voter. What’s to stop one person from collecting the PINs of past occupants or other residents and voting them all?

*How do we know they’re not being coerced by a friend or family member? Ask anyone who has worked a poll; they’ve had to stop people from going behind the private voting screen with the voter and attempting to influence them. If someone does want assistance, they need to sign a solemn declaration not to attempt to influence the voter. This is a real issue, and online there’s nothing to prevent coercion. The sanctity of the voting choice must be sacrosanct.

*With a physical ballot, there’s a paper trail. Where’s the paper trail with e-voting? There's none, it's all 0s and 1s. What if a server crashes, and votes disappear? Thousands could be disenfranchised, their votes disappeared forever into the electronic ether.

*No electronic system is secure. No matter how much security and encryption you build in, you will be vulnerable. If experienced and dedicated hackers (and today the majority of illegal online activity isn’t rebellious youth; it's organized crime, corporate espionage and nation states) want to penetrate the system, they will. And the possible motives for wanting to disrupt or influence a federal election are endless.

It could be that concerns such as these could be satisfied. We’ll see. But I think there’s a high bar that will need to be met before we trust something as fundamental as our democracy to computers. Look at the online voting experience for the BC Liberal leadership race -- something as simple as delays by Canada Post delivering PINs threatened to scuttle the process.

And in the interim, while I wouldn’t argue against progress, the fact is I like our current system and I don’t see much of a hurry to move online. Voting is a our civic duty. It’s 15 minutes our of our lives every four years (more or less), popping into our local church basement or school gymnasium to pick our national representatives. Ask the people of Libya if they’d see it as a burden.

I don’t know if I want voting to be an app on my phone, next to AngryBirds. I think it’s a little more important than that, and we should treat it that way.

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Are we ready for online voting?

Are we ready for online voting? It's an idea that's on the table for debate in British Columbia, where BC Liberal leadership candidate Christy Clark put it forward recently as something we should consider and discuss, with several of the other candidates quickly agreeing its an idea worth exploring:

Online voting sounds like a nice idea in theory. You'd obviously still have physical polls, but online voting would make it a lot easier for people to vote, would encourage young people that live online to vote, and could well increase voter turnout.

Nice in theory, but I have some serious concerns I'd need satisfied before I'd ever consider supporting online voting.

We actually had a debate on this at the last federal Liberal biennial in Vancouver during the constitutional plenary, when the delegates considered an amendment that would have opened the door to online voting for nomination races.

I went into the debate supporting the amendment from the perspective of someone who grew up in a massive rural riding, where we either had to run multiple polls or ask people to drive for hours to cast a vote. But during the debate the nays had me reconsidering.

Online voting is so anonymous. How do we do who is sitting at that computer, and that they actually are who they say they are? Someone could have gathered-up a bunch of PINs and be voting them. Maybe someone moved, the new residents got their PIN in the mail and is casting their ballots.

How do you guard against persuasion and intimidation? In a physical polling place, unless they need assistance a voter must go to the voting screen alone, and can cast a secret ballot. What's to stop an abusive spouse or partner from standing over the computer and making sure they "vote correctly?"

And then there's the IT security issue. How long before someone hacks the system, destroys or compromises records, and puts the integrity of the result into question? As a journalist my day job is covering the technology sector, and I'm not confident of its ability to keep a system safe and secure.

The beauty of our current system is its simplicity. We go to the voting place, show our id, and get a ballot. We mark an X for one person, and put it in a box. The staff count up all the ballots, the results are tabulated, and a winner declared. If there's a discrepancy or a challenge, we go back to the physical ballots and re-count them. There's virtue in that simplicity. Technology doesn't make everything better.

And not for nothing, but how easy do we really need to make it to vote? Is taking 30 minutes out of your life every couple of years to go to an elementary school gymnasium and mark an X really that much of a sacrifice to make for our democracy? Shouldn't voting require some level of commitment, of engagement, of effort?

As I said, I like the theory of online voting. I'm glad we're having the debate, and that the BC Liberal race is seeing a lot of interesting ideas put on the table. But they've got a long ways to go to convince me online voting could be viable, practicable, and desirable.

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