Norway Scraps Online Voting

An anonymous reader sends news that Norway will no longer experiment with online voting: [T]he trials have ended because, said the government, voters' fears about their votes becoming public could undermine democratic processes. Political controversy and the fact that the trials did not boost turnout also led to the experiment ending. In a statement, Norway's Office of Modernisation said it was ending the experiments following discussions in the nation's parliament about efforts to update voting systems. The statement said although there was "broad political desire" to let people vote via the net, the poor results from the last two experiments had convinced the government to stop spending money on more trials. ... A report looking into the success of the 2013 trial said about 70,000 Norwegians took the chance to cast an e-vote. This represented about 38% of all the 250,000 people across 12 towns and cities who were eligible to vote online. However, it said, there was no evidence that the trial led to a rise in the overall number of people voting nor that it mobilised new groups, such as young people, to vote.

Re:What logic!

[FaxeTheCat]

The problem was that the overall turnout did not increase. So 38% of those who would have voted anyway chose to do it electronically. As developing and maintaining a complex system that is used every second year would be quite expensive, along with privacy issues etc., making it a little more convenent to vote is just not a good enough reason. At least not at this time.

A smart move

[Albanach]

Over a decade ago, there was a GNU project [gnu.org] for internet voting. With no financial incentive, the driving force was a belief that there would be a benefit in making voting easier. The project was abandoned after they realized how difficult creating a secure, reliable and anonymous internet voting system actually is.

The founder of the project quotes Bruce Schneier as saying, "a secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers."

Of course, if someone here wants to show their credentials and explain why Schneier is wrong, I'm sure many of us would love to hear their reasoning.