Myles writes to point to this amusing video (from a site hosted in the Netherlands) about a Floridian voter trying to select John Kerry. While this is obviously in jest, electronic voting is becoming a tremendous threat to democracy. Everything I’ve read about the subject tells a sorry tale of broken machines, lousy security and little accountability. These two sites (both, predictably, designed in red, white and blue) provide a decent overview of what’s wrong with electronic voting. I’m optimistic that these issues, along with the size of Canada’s population, will prevent our government from seriously considering a move to electronic voting.
Electronic Voting
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DarrenBarefoot.com 
“The Economist” has similar qualms. It’s been the subject of a number of articles there and elsewhere and the bottom line seems to be “Embrace the new technology–but get a paper copy just in case”.
There is already electronic voting in Canada. There will be more unless citizens strongly oppose it. In Canada it has been working its way up from the municipal level, unlike the US where we see it in current national elections.
Markham Ontario had INTERNET voting.
The Chief Elections Officer of Ontario has already issued an RFP for voting technology pilot projects. He was previously in charge of elections in Toronto, where they already use voting machines.
Various cities in BC have used various models of electronic voting machines, usually optical mark-sense scanners that read marked paper ballots.
I write about this issue in my Paper Vote Canada blog.
http://blog.papervotecanada.ca/
My impression is that electronic voting (like most technology introduced into a process that has a perfectly functional, though low tech, system) is designed more to make the people supplying the technology more money, rather than to improve the system.
So many people in the US talk about how it’s important to know the results that evening (for legitimacy reasons), which never seemed to make any sense to me. Isn’t accuracy more important? Use paper ballots, one for president, another for all the other things people vote for during a federal election. Count them. Seems to work for us. But then, of course, our balloting is handled by the federal government, while in the US it’s handled by each state.
Bah, I’m probably just an unwitting tool of the paper ballot company lobby 😉