EDITOR:
James Aylward is emoting about e-voting (electronic or online voting) on the Island. He points out that the 2016 plebiscite showed e-voting to be the most popular method. Is it significant that it was the first province-wide use of e-voting? Did it reveal the all-party geeky underbelly of Islanders?
Yes, I voted online in the plebiscite. No, I didn't vote for the e-vote. I had and have misgivings about the procedure. These misgivings have increased since the hacker-riddled 2016 vote in be USA.
True, much of that was dealing with pre-vote interference and influence, but there are concerns about hacking making the vote itself invalid. A Feb. 21 article in the New York Times by Kim Zetter shows that voting machines cannot be hacker proof. They all have a connection to the internet, from machines used for voter registration to the actual voting machines. The results may be altered. There were voters who said that their vote changed on the screen before their eyes just before it was taken as their vote.
E-voting is all via the internet and hacking is an internet game. Teresa Wright does examine the security problems quite thoroughly, which in itself should lead us away from e-voting. Aylward says that we are small enough that we shouldn't have problems of hacking.
This is like saying that we will be safe because Vladimir Putin doesn't want to be the Premier of the Island.
Carl Mathis,
Charlottetown
