Identified Problems with Paper Ballots
General Thoughts on Internet voting
Suggestions for Amendments to the Electoral Rules
The Web Election
Committee’s mandate is to examine methods to automate the voting system at
Jon Bell - Male Head
of College (dfwjb@hotmail.com)
Emily Lord - Elected
committee member - (emblee@hotmail.com)
Tanya Magnus - Female
Head of College (tanya_magnus@trinity.utoronto.ca)
Michael Meeuwis -
Deputy Returning Officer (meeuwism@trinity.utoronto.ca)
Andrew Morgan –
Elected committee member, Committee Chair (andrew.morgan@utoronto.ca)
Matt Napier – Elected
committee member (m_napes@hotmail.com)
Naureen Shameem –
Chief Returning Officer (aerinsol@hotmail.com)
Adam Wakefield – Elected committee member (fufb@hotmail.com)
The
Web Election Committee initially discussed the issue via e-mail, and then
followed up by a meeting in person on
The impetus to investigate web elections comes from the follow problems identified with the current system of using paper ballots:
One option was to ask the Student Information Systems (SIS) (www.sis.utoronto.ca), the department at the University of Toronto responsible for the ROSI (www.rosi.utoronto.ca) to host the elections for Trinity.
Pros:
Cons:
E-mail Concerning ROSI Option:
From: Jim Delaney [mailto:jim.delaney@utoronto.ca]
Sent: November 22, 2001 11:04 AM
To: Andrew Morgan
Cc: Rick Hayward; Kirstin Cirulis; Susan Addario; Paul Oleskevych
Subject: Re: Fwd: Online Voting for Trinity
Hi Andrew,
Student Information Systems (SIS) forwarded your message to me.
I certainly imagine a day when all student elections could occur
on-line (perhaps all at the same time) -- but it's going to take some
time for us to get there.
At present, while the SAC and GC elections are run within ROSI, the
maintenance and data related tasks (such as loading candidate data)
are handled outside of Student Information Systems. The Governing
Council secretariat handles the GC elections and Student Affairs
handles the SAC elections. We even print the results for SAC locally.
There are a number of issues to consider here:
1) Development Cost. The core election module exists -- but there
will be a cost to adapt the SAC or GC modules for other elections.
Eligibility to vote for the SAC elections is based upon payment of
the SAC fee while eligibility to vote for GC is based upon student
status (part-time/full-time) in combination with an association with
categories of academic divisions in ROSI. Trinity College Meeting
elections would presumably be based upon association with Trinity or
payment of the student society fee. This may sound like a trivial
modification -- but there are complexities to this that require
considerable testing for each different voter eligibility requirement.
2) Development Time, ROSI Priorities and SIS Staff Resources --
depending upon the nature of the work. There is a considerable
amount of ongoing development work in SIS on ROSI in general. A new
election module would need to compete with other priorities already
in queue. You might recall that the delay in the SAC elections last
spring related largely to availability of SIS staff to complete the
work.
3) Support Staff Availability. Since all the maintenance is done
outside of SIS, it means that staff resources somewhere else within
the University must be devoted to this. Because of a variety of
considerations (e.g. training, understanding of the module), SIS has
decided that Student Affairs would need to do this for all web based
elections for student societies. SIS sounded pretty firm about this
when we met recently -- but at an absolute minimum, it would have to
be a University staff member who maintains the data since it requires
staff access to ROSI.
4) Actual Election Costs. Your requests for estimates assume that
this is a service that can simply be purchased. The reality is that
in the current set-up, only the development costs would need to be
covered. Student Affairs would be incurring the actual maintenance
costs since our staff do the work (and, as you know, we do not bill
out for services).
5) Priorities for Election Development. This is a relatively new
feature of ROSI. Frankly, I would like to see how it goes this year
(running GC and SAC at the same time) before we start adding more
elections. In addition, while the GSU has formally indicated that
they have no interest in web-based voting, we would also need to
accommodate APUS (and the remote possibility of the GSU) before we
start adding new elections.
The bottom line is that I don't think this will be possible for
2001-02. Even if we had Student Affairs staff available, I can't see
this moving up the ROSI priority list in time. Remember that ROSI
is, primarily, an academic registration and student records system --
academic priorities need to come first.
Nonetheless, it might be possible for future years. If you want to
start thinking about 2002-03, we could map out the steps now.
Paul Oleskevych in our office does the actual maintenance work for
the SAC elections. If you want to get together on this, Paul should
join us so that he can give you a clearer understanding of the work
that occurs at this end for the SAC elections.
You didn't mention whether or not there is support among Trinity
administrators for this. At the very least, it would be good to have
Bruce Bowden's support in principle (since registrars have a key
relationship with SIS with respect to ROSI enhancements).
Jim
The Trinity Bursar’s lodge would give out one random number to every Trin. Student that went into them, and this number would be their log in and password to the voting site. There could either be one number for all elections, or one for every week. We would need to find a programmer to design the database that this fed into.
Pros:
Cons:
E-Mail Concerning Trinity Option
From: Gilbert Verghese [mailto:gv@trinity.utoronto.ca]
Sent: November 22, 2001 1:09 AM
To: Stephen Doma; Andrew Morgan
Subject: Re: Online Voting for Trinity
If you look at the head's package you'll see that the majority of students
use non-trin email accounts. How would you guarantee one vote per person and
how would you authenticate voter identity?
One way would be to generate a voting code (ballot) for each student like we
do for account creation codes and mail each individual their code. A code
can be used only once. You could use php and a mysql table to keep track of
who has voted and how. Do you know php and mysql? If so it's a few hours of
programming and testing. The expense is in sending out the ballots. I
wouldn't use email because people may know other people's passwords. Maybe
you could just leave the ballots with people's names on them with the
Porters, if you trust them.
Gilbert
This is the system that the Engineers use. Every engineer that wants to vote in their elections sends an email to the CRO, at a special CRO account, using their ecf.utoronto.ca accounts – which they have to get when the sign up for their program. The CRO then responds to everyone email, with just the contents of the original text, to ensure that people were not fake voting. This option could be made into Trin.’s using either everyone’s Trinity account, or their utoronto.ca account. This option assumes that everyone has a secure email site, and that they check it regularly.
Pros:
Cons:
E-mail Concerning E-mail Option:
From: "Ashley Morton" <ashleyjmorton@hotmail.com>
To: smrt@yahoogroups.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smrt/message/2898
Date: Sun Jul 22, 2001 12:50 am
Subject: How an election can work.
Hi.
…
I thought that I might venture into the fray of election discussion. My primary contribution will be a description of what works in Engineering, and why I think that it works, but first:
-There's not a snowball's chance in Hell that ROSI would do the Trin elections. They are, in general, throroughly incompetent, and actually, we in Engineering contacted them about it last year (we also do preferential voting, but we only have one week's worth). They laughed in our face, and made some comment to the effect of not having enough time to make sure that the marks subprogram always worked, and having the SAC one shoved down their throat.
A for the Engineering election:
Our constituency is larger, but not by an order of magnitude, but has many of the same features:
-A small group of people who are very involved, though clearly not always in agreement.
-A significant portion of the constituency who never pass through the building (students who are doing an internship year, who may be as near as College & University, or as far away as Johannesburg)
-A non-participatory (at least in the "standard" ways) group who often gripe about paying student fees and not being really represented.
Anyways, here's how we run our (one week only) election.
-There is only one ballot box, in the central cafeteria in Engineering. Anyone who can reasonably be expected to pass through the Engineering section of campus (ie is not on an internship year) must vote there if they wish to vote.
-Students who are on internship years must send an email to two addresses (one which the CRO holds the password for, and one which the registrar holds the password for), sometime after the first time the poll is open, and sometime before it closes for the last time. This means that they may vote overnight between voting days, but can't vote before campaigning is finished, or anything. They send their name and student number in the subject line, and then in the body, only their votes. An email is sent out to every one of them with the template for this on it (basically a ballot). They must respond from the email account that the CRO's outgoing email was sent to. If they don't it is automatically disqualified.
-If there is ever a situation in which there is less than two poll clerks, the poll is closed. There must be two little initials on the bottom corner of every ballot, or it is not valid.
-Campaigning is allowed, but on a very limited scale. Candidates may not take office (the prime indicator being the set of keys to the physical office) until all remnants of campaigning are removed. The numbers of posters and leaflets are proscribed (100 each, I believe, but that would obviously be a smaller number in Trin's case) Candidates may also speak in public (we have classes which are almost exclusively engineers, so it works well, but dinner, etc. would work), but obviously are then subject to rotten fruit (one guy actually had a banana thrown at him this year, because he had interrupted a class).
-There is a CRO, who is elected, but as it is a year-long job, and there are people looing over your shoulder at every step, very few people want it.
-Vote counting: scrutineers and returning officers are allowed into a room, and first all email votes are counted as such: the two email accounts are opened in the same room, and are compared. All people who emailed outside the time deadline are eliminated. All people who voted in person (because internship students may vote at the box if they wish) as well as email voted are eliminated. Then all the emails are printed. All of the headers are physically ripped off the papers, and the papers are shuffled. From there, the counting is pretty simple. We developed a good program this year, using excel to do the preferential switching of votes.
Oh yeah, and we had a 25.6% turnout. That's over 1200 votes.
We counted them all for 5 positions in just under 7 hours. 6.5 of those hours were spent just opening the ballots and reading them. only about half an hour was spent on all the formalities of the email ballots, and the switching of preferential votes around.
I know that it's not 100% portable, but I really think that the system works. What's the voter turnout for a college (not SAC) election, even H of C? 5%? 10%?
I think that the two basic things that our system has over Trin's are campaigning (four of the five positions were filled by non-clique people, yet people who had impressive credentials), and the basic belief by most people that it is fair and safe. I know that I don't trust the Trin system, because it just doesn't have the checks and balances (two initials on the ballot, voting booths, etc.) I wouldn't trust the Trin system as it is now. Not that I'm going to have a shot, now, because I got rejected for res anyway.
Cheers,
Ashley
The CRO would sit at a computer in the Buttery with a swipe card verifier. Students would swipe their T-Cards as they vote in person with paper ballots. The computer would have to be secure, but we could use a Trinity lock box, which apparently there are a few around college.
Pro:
Cons:
There are a number of corporations that will host Internet voting. It is expected that their prices would be far beyond Trinity’s budget. These corporations are:
http://www.safevote.com/
http://www.votehere.net/
http://www.election.com/
After discussing all the options, we noticed that the same problems were coming up:
Internet Voting Technology Alliance
Group to set standards for Internet Voting
http://www.ivta.org/
SecurePoll
Clearinghouse of Internet voting information
http://www.securepoll.com/
The Bell
Bi-Monthly Publication on Privacy, Security and Technology in Internet Voting
http://www.thebell.net/
16 Online Voting
System Requirements
http://www.thebell.net/papers/vote-req.pdf
Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project
http://www.vote.caltech.edu/
GNU Free Internet Voting Software
Non-preferential, Java based voting software available for free
http://www.free-project.org/
University of Toronto Governing Council
Web Election Student Survey
Survey of 1210 U of T students on their views towards Web Elections
http://www.utoronto.ca/govcncl/bac/studentvoting2001.pdf
The Web Election Committee recommends that it pursue the ROSI option for the March 2003 election.
On January 30, 2002, the Trinity Joint College Meeting (JCM) voted to reject the recommendation of the Web Election Committee, therefore ending the Web Election Committee’s activities.