If more people express their views, believe that they will be heard and that they can get involved and make a difference then we will have a healthier more participative society. Yes?
That’s one of my reasons for standing as a member of parliament. To try to break down the cynicism that people feel towards politics and politicians. It’s one of the goals of OpenLabourNZ.
Exercising your vote is an important way to express your views. Currently, in New Zealand, it’s not compulsory. It is compulsory to be on the electoral roll.
But quite a lot of people aren’t. For various reasons. Why then shouldn’t we make it easier for them? Currently you can enrol and change your details online, but you have to print off the fom, sign it and post to Elections NZ (the Electoral Commission). You can’t vote online.
In Australia, where’ there’s about to be a federal election, where it is compulsory to vote and the rolls are about to close, the Australian Electoral Commission is refusing to allow people to enrol online. An activist group called GetUp is taking them to court .
The activist group GetUp! is taking legal action to push its case that would-be voters should be able to enrol on the internet after the Australian Electoral Commission said it would reject voters who used the group’s enrolment tool.
The commission has warned that voters who have changed address have until 8pm today to update their details.
The GetUp! enrolment website OzEnrol.com, launched last Friday, allowed people to fill in an enrolment form online, using their mouse or trackpad to sign their name.
But the commission said the “digitally constructed” signature was not allowed under electoral law, making such enrolments invalid.
I believe we should be trying new ways and making it easier for people to be more actively involved and to exercise their democratic rights. It seems arcane to prevent them from participing in the democratic process. It’s not impossible surely! With appropriate security safeguards of course.
Something for us to consider? And why not be able to vote online?
Ha! Draco My sibling is ill and recently couldn’t get out of bed at all and so got a relative to do some online banking on the person’s behalf – example.
Have you ever had a pain in the a*** experience of filling in an online form and hitting next and then it keeps telling you that you’ve done something wrong and you check and you haven’t? If Joe Lazy doesn’t want to fill out all the options then I don’t care
Oh yeah, some online forms lose data unexpectedly and then you have to start all over again, might not get that chance on site.
I don’t consider a fair election to decide who is going to make or break my country a mole hill.
Sometimes you have no way of knowing that anything ever went wrong though, much like an email that said sent that never shows up in a friend’s inbox things can just disappear in cyberspace
Bleep me!
A person might just have had a nervous breakdown around election time, but hate their previous choice, and just not have it in them to vote 
If someone is apathetic enough and their old vote is being counted they just may not care. Imagine a world where the proportion of apathy was so high that the same people had autovote at every election and the government never changed?
Then the ones who do vote would think their votes make no difference and get apathetic 
Internet data bases not safe a wee example
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10661073
Computerised voting makes me nervous. I dont know if it is any more or less open to corruption than the old polling booth and paper but… I still feel uneasy… and its hard to forget the Ohio results in the second Bush election…
Shudder
http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/2004_Ohio_Irregularities_-_Details
then peek at Diebold acusations…
Oh dear
I think I’d rather have monkeys counting my votes 
If it was that necessary then they should have brought the PC to them.
It’s not a question of being lazy but a question a people trying to force FPP onto an STV election and you should care about people corrupting the system.
And that’s one reason why you set it up so that people can check and change their vote.
There are always outliers and you can’t produce a perfect system because of them. The idea is to catch most of them. Somebody having a nervous breakdown and not being able to vote is such a rare event that you can’t write laws around it.
I doubt if that would ever happen as people do want change. My idea was because we don’t want to punish people for not voting but we do want to encourage them to vote and assuming, if they don’t vote, that they don’t want change is the only way I can think of to do that.
I’m pointing out that it’s possible to make online voting just as fair as paper voting and that it would be less difficult to do so and more transparent. The mountain that you’re making is out of concerns that can easily be addressed.
@Tracey:
The US computerised voting system is a great example of how not to do things. Massive amounts of secrecy, no public testing of the systems and then it was set up and run by people who didn’t actually know what they were doing. It was from reading of that experience that I came to the conclusion that people needed to be able to check their vote and to be able to change it after the counting date (within a reasonable time frame) if necessary.
With real human beings standing over the counters… If we computerise then it becomes your programmer versus mine, anothe rissue which raised its head during the 2004 US election. One programmer submitted an affidavit alleging he was paid to programme to make certain things happen which were contrary to the intention of the vote cast.
Don’t replace a system which is working well (paper ballots) with anything else unless there are massive and undeniable advantages to be had.
I agree that being able to edit enrolment information etc online would be really useful, it is quick and doesn’t require stuff being posted backwards and forwards, all that would be needed is a confirmation email and you’re away
However, I’d be a little nervous about actually voting online, there just seems to be potentially so many things to go wrong
Draco – s/he couldn’t even see from three different drugs s/he was prescribed after s/he was taken by ambulance unable to breathe.
I’m an MMP fan, just as long as Joe unpopular party who gets a seat can only bring his own hyde in
If you can’t make a perfect electronic voting system then that equates to an imperfect democracy, whereas what we have now is working
My point was that a computer could say that your vote was logged and you check it and then some mini crash destroys it
Man I tell you I know people who dopn’t care either way, one example is a mate earning a lot and his wife earning, no kids and he genuinely doesn’t care about politics. Auto vote for Bill and Ben just isn’t as funny as someone actually standing at the polls ticking them.
I still think it’s a genuine mountain not a created one, if studylink can’t even get their system right then what hope do we have of securing a decent online voting system?
Yes the US is a dog’s breakfast, and as we seem to be following in the failures of many countries at the moment, I’m not optimistic about this.
That’s the benefit of Open Source programming where anyone can see the source code and pick it to bits and fix it. Such as you describe here cannot happen simply because another programmer will pick up on it. You get such corruption from the corporate/capitalist world but you won’t find it in community.
Then the banking could, and should, have waited.
What we have now isn’t perfect. I’d say that it’s less perfect than what we can get from online voting. What you’re really saying is that we shouldn’t change it because it won’t be perfect even if it may be better. Starting to sound like conservatives there Spud and Loota.
The banking couldn’t wait, it was something that had to be done urgently. Would it digust you further to know that I know my Ma’s atm pin?
Oooh, Draco
Not a conservative, just weary of the pitfalls 
DTB said:
It may be better? That whole learning curve, cost, exposure to new risks, and we can’t even be sure if it will even be as good as paper ballots. All we know for sure is that electronic voting would be different to paper ballots, but being different is not necessarily much better.
@ Loota:
I already used one example as to where online voting would be better – in STV. Sure, we don’t use STV in voting for central government but there’s plenty local governments that do.
Then there’s speed, accuracy, transparency and cost. No counting of paper ballots is going to be as fast or as accurate as a computer. Transparency is a hell of a lot better than now because people will be able to check their vote. As it stands if a vote is uncountable (ruined, lost, etc) there’s no way to check that and so people are losing their vote. This would be almost impossible under the conditions of which I’ve put in my Basic Howto: And then there’s cost which is going to be cheaper than hiring the people and locations of the present system.
So, that may be better is pretty much guaranteed to be better.
This still doesn’t stop all the issues that we’ve mentioned
We can check our votes now, it’s called eyeballing the paper before you chuck it in the slot.
DTB – then I think a case needs to be put together to see what benefits online voting would have under an MMP system and if those benefits are actually substantial.
E.g. people will be able to check their vote in an online system yes, so that is a benefit, but how many votes were actually declared spoilt last general election? That will quantify the level of benefit.
For local body elections, it is currently a postal vote carried out over several weeks. How much faster is online voting going to make things? And is that time saved all that critical?
Then with any online system you have the risk of hacks (Hells Pizza anyone?) where how you voted might become public information, denial of service attacks, spoofing etc.
I’m not saying that there are no benefits, but unless those benefits are massive, (and the costs/risks/unknowns pretty low) I’d tend to stay put.
But that’s just me, however being risk averse when managing a basic fundamental of democracy is probably no bad thing.
Brace yourself, Loota, Clare has added another post on this dodgy subject
But we can’t check it after we’ve put it in the slot and counted can we? And that is when it really needs to be checked.
Which carries it’s own security problems, loss of mail as well as producing a hell of a lot of waste. Speed isn’t that much of an advantage but the accuracy and transparency is.
Hacks do happen but they can be mitigated against. Banks seem quite happy to have trillions of dollars available to hackers and I doubt if Hells Pizza would be using the same sort of security that would be used for voting.
And you also seem to believe that the present system isn’t open to corruption which it is. A system that can be corrupted by people selling out will eventually be bought out. The previously gerrymandered FPP electorates is proof of that. All we can do is put in place procedures that help prevent these things from happening.
As you say, it would be best if a government commission looked into it to quantify these things.
@Draco – No, but there will be scrutineers who will all eyeball that paper – just to make sure that one of the other B******s from the other parties is not ripping them off. Very, very careful and suspicious of other scrutineers I’m sure.
I know someone who had mail go missing, turns out the postie was a thief!
No postie is gping to bother stealing voting papers for local body elections.
Come on Draco – did you see that doco piece on that teenager with aspergers who hacked into government computers?
Oh come on.
She’s asking a question here. Are the concerns over security valid? If we never ask, we’ll have this auto assumption.
Personally, I think that computerizing it might be a good thing. What if, instead of a paper ballot, you’re sat in front of a monitor and use a mouse to fill in details? You’ve got an almost instant count and other information being able to be recorded – such as the time votes were cast. Perhaps a small paper element for signatures to say that X person cast their vote around Y time. I don’t mean over the Internet but rather at the voting booths themselves (Point-to-Point).
I would love to see some element of active participation in the current government – whether that’s by having a party who runs online polls for current issues and votes in parliament based on the figures in those polls, or it’s by looking to the public to participate in coming up with policies (although, this is more easily said than done – think we need to look at this a bit more). In otherwords, I anticipate the Internet being a huge part of how things are managed and I really think that questions need to be asked at times contrary to what we accept as fact.
The fact is, what we have now, doesn’t work great (low voting numbers) and even the paper ballots could be made a hell of a lot more efficient….
“Are the concerns over security valid?” Yes they are.
“and votes in parliament based on the figures in those polls,” My worry about this is that most people won’t bother going to the site to fill out the polls, polls can be fiddled with and do these voters actually understand the issues? Some issues are more complex than others.
I think the low voter turn out has more to do with people’s feelings or lack of about politics than the actual method of voting.
Still not registering the massive benefits associated with going electronic.
Yes, some incremental improvements are possible, but what major problems with paper ballots does going electronic actually solve?
Building a concrete bunker under your house is mitigation against a nuclear war. Doesn’t mean that the end result isn’t still going to be FUBAR.
You seem to miss the point, its not the banks who are vulnerable its you and me. When our bank accounts get hacked, our credit cards skimmed and sold, our identities stolen.
Look, I’m not against exploring radical electronic options, but before considering any of them seriously for implementation they must embody massive benefits compared to incrementally improving current paper methods (Nevyn I think yu have a point, there is a lot of room for improvement within the pen and paper system as it stands).
Can we please redefine progress here: just because we can do a thing (make all voting purely electronic) it doesn’t mean that we should do that thing.
Yes I think these things should be seriously looked at. Anything to help people participate in the democratic process inbetween election cycles would be a great thing.
(If that happens i suspect voting rates would climb, regardless of whether paper/electronic methods were used)