Upcoming Event: ‘E-volving Democracy: A Public Dialogue on Online Voting’
On May 26, PartyX and Fair Voting BC will host an interactive dialogue session on online voting. Participants will look at the risks associated with a web-based decision making process – and how trust can potentially be built into a system.
E-volving Democracy: Online Voting Public Dialogue
Saturday, May 26, 2012, 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.
@ The Hive, 128 West Hastings Street #210
By donation ($10 suggested to cover costs)
Facebook Event Page for ‘E-volving Democracy’
RSVP here: http://evolvingdemocracy.eventbrite.ca/
The session is the first in the “E-volving Democracy” dialogue series highlighting current issues related to technology, democracy, and the theory and practice of collective decision-making. This event is designed for anyone who wants to make change happen – including democracy and social justice activists, open source coders and hackers, philosophers and academics, facilitators and convenors.
The session will include a panel discussion featuring Andrew MacLeod (legislative reporter, The Tyee); Steve Wolfman (Computer Science, SFU) and Fathima
Cadre (UBC Law and anti-online voting advocate). In small group discussions, participants will identify and prioritize conditions they believe a proposed online voting system would have to satisfy before it could be used in good conscience in a public election.
“Online voting is an issue of increasing importance for the progressive democracy movement, particularly with its potential to engage larger and more diverse demographics – especially younger generations – in the political process,” says *John Richardson*, founder of PartyX. “But with this potential also comes risk surrounding fraud, security, privacy and soon. Any system we use has to be trustworthy. But what this looks like means different things to different people.”
“Online voting is increasingly being proposed, planned and used at all levels of government as a possible way to re-engage voters in our political processes,” said *Antony Hodgson*, President of Fair Voting BC. “But for online voting to play this role, voters have to be able to trust the process and results. Technical failures or scandals arising from premature adoption could destroy public faith in elections, so we need to think through carefully how we could know that a proposed online voting process was trustworthy.”
The results and recommendations from this dialogue will inform PartyX and Fair Voting BC’s official policy positions on online voting, which will be shared with government and made widely available online.
