Nanaimo's Been Voting Electronically For Years!!!

Letter submitted to and published (with some changes - ???) by the Harbour City Star on July 12/08)

Dear Editor,
Well, you sort of got it right ("E-voting is off the ballot for Nanaimo", Harbour City Star, June 28/08). You write that Nanaimo has "put aside plans to allow people to vote by phone or computer" when it would have been more correct to state that the provincial Ministry which provides the legislative framework for local (municipal) elections, the Ministry of Community Services, to their credit, declined to grant such an important power to the City of Nanaimo in a hurry. Sober reflection and careful deliberation are essential in situations like this.
Although City staff began the mis-use of the term 'electronic voting', you do the same when you imply that the voters of Nanaimo have not been doing so before. The facts are that the City of Nanaimo has been voting electronically since at least 1999, using the democracy-challenging Diebold optical scan, electronic voting machines. The use of the phone or internet to vote requires one to add the 'remote' designation to the term.
While Ms. Harrison may be right in that remote electronic voting could "encourage higher participation", although the results where it has been tried are mixed, the one thing that we know for sure is that it would open up the most basic of our democratic rights and obligations to potential vote buying/selling, vote stealing, voter coercion, vote tampering and hacking. So far, the security experts agree that it just isn't worth the risk! Just consider how many critical security-related patches Microsoft has strongly advised you to install to your Windows/Internet Explorer software in the past month alone!
If Nanaimo is really serious about significantly increasing voter turnout, might I suggest that, as a start, they do everything in their power to treat the individual's vote with the respect it deserves. "Ensuring the reliability, security, and verifiability of public elections is fundamental to a stable democracy. Convenience and speed of vote counting are no substitute for accuracy of results and trust in the process by the electorate" - Assn. for Computing Machinery.