Last year Rob Shaw wrote a piece for the Times Colonist about online voting in British Columbia. (This is a Bad Idea by the way, for reasons that are expounded elsewhere.) At the very end of his article, we read:
B.C.’s flirtation with online voting coincides with changes to its information and privacy laws last year that paved the way for high-tech identity cards.
The government has said people will one day be able to use the cards to verify their identity and access Internet-based government services, including, potentially, online voting.
No government document released under FOIA laws that I’ve read has stated voting as a driver of the card. However, this isn’t an indictment of Shaw’s reporting but of the government’s unwillingness to fully disclose documents pertaining to the Services Card.
To be clear: there is no good reason to believe that the Services Card will be particularly helpful in combating the core problems related to online voting. It won’t actually verify that the same person associated with the Card is casting the ballot. It won’t ensure that the person is voting in a non-coerced manner. It won’t guarantee that malware hasn’t affected the computer to ‘vote’ for whomever the malware writer wants voted for.
The Services Card is (seemingly) a solution looking for a problem. Voting is not one problem to which the Card is the solution.
Excited Pixels 