Efforts to digitize elections continued this year with widespread experiments in online voting and campaigning. But the process has been rocky, and some question whether the rush to adopt online polling will expose elections to security flaws.
Supporters consider online voting a silver bullet against historically low rates of voter turnout on campus. The question has become how much of the electoral process can be carried out securely in cyberspace.
Woodsworth, Victoria, and Trinity are just a few of the colleges that have cautiously experimented with online voting systems in recent years. Rotman commerce students also vote online through the Rotman Web Portal, while university-administered elections for various positions and groups have also made the leap online at www.voting.utoronto.ca or under the “Elections” tab on ROSI.
The largest and most closely watched campus election — for the University of Toronto Students’ Union — is bucking the trend and shying away from even the future prospect of online voting.
In November 2011, on the advice of chief returning officer Daniel Lo, the Elections and Referenda Committee and the UTSU board of directors struck a provision from the electoral code that could eventually have enabled online voting.
Director Michael Scott, a vocal critic of the move, listed off the many apparent benefits of online voting.
Scott said that the online system is more convenient, less expensive, and easier to administer than paper ballots, and voting hours can be extended at no additional cost.
However, what Scott acknowledged as “legitimate security concerns” have become the major stumbling block in the push online.
“Online voting is not only easily compromised but unreliable,” said Corey Scott, vice-president internal and services at the UTSU, pointing to the frequent blackouts that plague ROSI during course registration and previous difficulties at Woodsworth College, which has used online voting for several years.
In March 2010, Rotman students were required to re-cast their votes after administrators uncovered five separate incidents of fraud.
Trinity College, which debuted an online voting system this year, has experienced several mishaps, including a benign hacker who contacted administrators to report a major security error. The college has settled on a system of having scrutineers manually check hard copies of all votes cast online in order to ensure the integrity of the system.
Madeline Burkhardt-Jones, chief returning officer at Trinity College, said that this year saw a huge increase in voter turnout, up to 20 per cent. But she also described some of the difficulties of pioneering an online system: emails with unique voter IDs accidentally deleted or absent-minded students forgetting to vote without the physical polling station to remind them.
At the University of Western Ontario (UWO), the implementation of online voting saw the highest turnout ever, up to 50 per cent of the student body. However, the system was also hacked, forcing a recount. The alleged hacker, Keith Horwood, is not a student at UWO and has since been charged on four different counts.
“I’m not magic, I’m not a superhero, I just happened to recognize the vulnerability and knew what to do with it,” Horwood told UWO’s Gazette.
Still, Michael Scott believes it is possible to “work to improve security instead of scrapping the idea entirely.”
“Internet banking and ROSI already involve the transfer of similarly sensitive information online, yet we accept that the benefits in these cases outweigh the costs,” he pointed out.
