Fairvote Canada
What is This Group is About?
De Quoi Parle ce Groupe?
The unofficial non-partisan Lemmy movement to bring proportional representation to all levels of government in Canada.
🗳️Voters deserve more choice and accountability from all politicians.
Le mouvement non officiel et non partisan de Lemmy visant à introduire la représentation proportionnelle à tous les niveaux de gouvernement au Canada.
🗳️Les électeurs méritent davantage de choix et de responsabilité de la part de tous les politiciens.
- A Simple Guide to Electoral Systems
- What is First-Past-The-Post (FPTP)?
- What is Proportional Representation (PR)?
- What is a Citizens’ Assembly?
- Why Referendums Aren't Necessary
- The 219 Corrupt MPs Who Voted Against Advancing Electoral Reform
Related Communities/Communautés Associées
Resources/Ressources
Official Organizations/Organisations Officielles
- List of Canadian friends of Democracy Bluesky
- Fair Vote Canada: Bluesky
- Fair Voting BC: Bluesky
- Charter Challenge for Fair Voting: Bluesky
- Electoral Renewal Canada: Bluesky
- Vote16: Bluesky
- Longest Ballot Committee: Bluesky
- ~~Make Votes Equal / Make Seats Match Votes~~
- Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto (IRV for municipal elections)
We're looking for more moderators, especially those who are of French and indigenous identities.
Politiques de modération de contenu
Nous recherchons davantage de modérateurs, notamment ceux qui sont d'identité française et autochtone.
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I agree with your assessment. The transparency and verifiability of paper ballots is a fundamental strength of our current system that electronic voting can't easily replicate.
The trust issue you've highlighted is crucial. Paper ballots create a physical audit trail that can be manually recounted by ordinary citizens. With electronic systems, we'd need to trust not just the code (which most citizens can't verify), but also the entire chain of custody of both hardware and software. As you noted, even with sophisticated cryptographic solutions, the public trust element is essential for democratic legitimacy.
There are also serious security concerns. Electronic systems create "single points of failure" that paper ballots distributed across thousands of polling stations don't have. Computer scientists and security experts have consistently warned about these vulnerabilities. See:
While I'm passionate about modernizing our democracy, I believe the focus should be on fixing the mathematical problem at the core of our electoral system - where millions of valid votes simply don't count. Electronic voting might change how we collect votes but doesn't address this fundamental democratic deficit.
Paper ballots with proportional representation would give us both the security benefits you've described and ensure every vote counts toward representation. That seems like the right sequence of priorities for strengthening our democracy.
I'd like to start by saying that I agree with both of you guys.
However like, I remember listening to JRE back in the day (yes, I hate him and don't listen to him anymore) and he brought up electronic voting.
I'm paraphrasing his show but he brought up things like
I would really like to be able to just get a phone notification and "bing" vote, but yeah, there's so many issues with electronic voting like you said.
From what I read, it appears that the problem is:
It seems that a lot of decisions in Canada about voting, who can vote, where they can vote, riding size and shape, ... are to get the right outcome from elections.
Maybe after PR passes those will change, but who knows.
There are two competing goals: traceability and anonymity. Banking has strong traceability and no anonymity. Having both is much harder than having one but not the other. Traceability is maintained until you put the ballot in the box, and the security of those boxes are maintained by multiple people. Banks also have traceability, by themselves and you, in part by removing anonymity - you can verify activity in your account. Anonymity is vital to maintain the integrity of the vote - if you can't prove who you voted for, your vote can't be easily sold or coerced out of you.
Sure, good point, simplicity would be nice, but part of the process is verifying who is voting and thay they aren't being coerced. Do you have any proposals for doing that remotely? I can't think of any.
We can have discussions about votes like we are, right now. It would be nice if more people did, and more policies could be easily read by laymen so we could do this without intermediaries such as news sites. And how to turn that into direct democracy, where everyone gets a vote, anonymously and verified? See above.
I hope things trend this way in the future, but there are fundamental problems to solve before it can be safely done.
I deeply disagree. Except for the trust issue.
First, PR is definitely more important at the moment. I will explain why disagree with the other points.
Addressing first the videos I finally had time to watch.
By the dates of those videos, there were plenty of examples of countries using electronic voting for at least 15 years. That person could easily use proper data to make their arguments, but they chose to engage in fearmongering, appeal to emotion, those videos are full of red flags highlighted in the Canadian campaign against disinformation. https://www.canada.ca/en/campaign/online-disinformation.html
For example, the example of USB being available for people had to be addresses in many of those countries, right-wing populists associated with Russia were using to create chaos during elections. https://www.tre-ap.jus.br/comunicacao/noticias/2022/Maio/e-fato-urnas-eletronicas-tem-portas-usb-mas-so-funcionam-dispositivos-especificos-da-justica-eleitoral (not sure how to share a deepl translation link)
In some of the examples I saw, the code is open source, or at least auditable, so is the hardware. And the entire chain of custody is recorded, and escorted.
They are even more transparent than paper voting.
Not really, the video you shared I already mentioned above.
Countries leading in technology are already using some sort of electronic vote. Estonia is the leader in cybersecurity in Europe, most countries go there to learn and improve their systems.
https://ccdcoe.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHiq5UfxePA
Security experts and computer scientists learn, tests and probe for vulnerabilities so they can prevent problems when implementing systems that will help people.
Not to foment fear and panic, and discourage people from voting.
Not really sure what you mean for single points of failure. Electronic voting varies from country to country, from having to visit electronic urns to voting on your phone.
There was a case in Belgium when there was a software error in their electronic urn that gave more points to one candidate. But because of the way that data is stored, and the security chain around it, it was easy to pinpoint the issue and fix the tally.
On the other hand, countries with electronic vote reported a decrease in corruption of the chain of custody, reduction in costs of compared with other voting ways. And of course, the reason I asked if it was part of the FairVote, increases of voters, increase in accessibility, and decrease in invalid votes (people commit fewer mistakes when voting).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_by_country#Estonia (edit: I put the link for Estonia, but I meant the entire article, it shows the decisions of each country and why they are using or not electronic voting).
Sadly, I can only find contents in English from Estonia and the European Union.
But on youtube, you can auto-generate the subtitles, then change it to auto-translate. It might have some funny moments, like when the person pointed to a printer, and it translated it as "teacher". But it helps to understand.
This video shows instead an electronic urn, and how they set up it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrMLzqgKEI This video shows is from their Elections organization explaining the security chain and audits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IOtrQhpKBE
The trust issue you’ve highlighted is crucial.
If the people do not trust or understand, it might make things hard. And it is even harder when they cannot trust their elected officials.
In my case, and probably where I am biased, I do not trust authoritarian regimes, and they are the ones trying to make people distrust elections, and technologies that can reduce corruption.