Thinking about remote voting options such as mail-in and internet voting (by which I mean voting remotely via the internet) , a quote from Jurassic Park comes to mind:

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. ”

This comes back to the question of priorities for a country’s democratic process. Given two seemingly rivalrous options, universal accessibility and universal ballot secrecy, which is the priority?

If, as in Canada’s case, you allow everyone the option of using remote voting then at least in theory you cannot guarantee protection from undue influence. It could therefore be said accessibility is given precedence.

It may be that a plausible middle ground is, as has been suggested, that voters are afforded remote voting as an option only if they can demonstrate an accessibility need. Therefore everyone gets access to the election, and ballot secrecy is still maintained for the majority of voters who are (presumably) able to attend the polling place.

So how do you demonstrate and accessibility need? I suppose you cannot directly. But in Canada many aspects of the voting process rely heavily on the use of statutory declarations to get around various unprovable situations. So the scheme would work like this: you get to vote remotely only if you’re absent or otherwise unable to attend the polling place which you affirm in a statutory declaration made as a pre-condition for remote voting.

But again we come back to priorities. In this case there’s a third priority beyond accessibility and secrecy: convenience. So what’s the priority? Should remote voting be about convenience for all voters, or accessibility for special needs voters?

Scantegrity II (Invisible Ink) is the latest development from the Punchscan/Votegrity team and was unveiled last week in Washington D.C. at the ITIF’s Future of Voting Forum.

Scantegrity II: Voters can mark optical scan ballots with a special pen that reveals a “confirmation code” of their selections. They are free to write this code down and look it up later to confirm the inclusion of their selections in the election outcome.

The debut demonstration of Scantegrity II at the Future of Voting forum.

The Votegrity team at the event.
(L-R: Aleks, Stefan, David, Jeremy, Rick)