@donkey Just shows why it's foolish to invest in an infrastructure built on someone else's proprietary technology (for reasons I explain here: https://davelane.nz/mshostage) - I'm pleased they're making the move now, but they should've been smart enough to realise this could happen at any time. And now it's going to be very expensive and painful to change because they've allowed themselves to succumb to lock-in, not because the #FOSS alternative is painful.

@donkey Sadly for the taxpayers of the world, all of our gov'ts are in the same boat, but they've *always* been paying the 10x more amount... for the past 20ish years. Imagine if that $ had been invested in the local industry instead, and in local enhancement of #FOSS that everyone could've used instead...

@lightweight @donkey I was frothing at the mouth when I found out how much #CorporateWelfare the #NZ government has been giving FarceBook every year to "advertise" to its own citizens. It could have built its own social network system for that sort of money.

@strypey @lightweight agreed - there’s a lot of tension there between “where the people are”, “what we can afford” and the “what is best for democracy”.

@donkey @strypey Sadly, that conflict only exists for people without sufficient technical knowledge and strategic savvy to realise that it's not a "network effect" or technology problem. All could be sorted, as I've told them in the past, for very low cost using openly available software from the global digital #FOSS commons.

@lightweight @strypey yup. At least they seem to have listened regarding the paperless voting.., 😉

@donkey @strypey well, eventually even the gov't spy agency agreed that it was a totally unwarranted risk to take. But there are still people in Local Gov't especially who're committed to foisting online voting upon us because they don't "get" tech stuff (or, perhaps, how crucial it is that voters can trust our democratic institution & those administering it). I've talked to some of them.

@lightweight that's not the reason. Have you seen how much it costs to send a letter now? With the last users of snail mail moving to digital billing, and even the government moving to email and secure messaging within its websites, postal voting is rapidly becoming uneconomic. This is why digital voting for local body elections *will* happen. We can stick our fingers in the dyke, or we can put our energy into influencing *how* it happens.
@donkey

@strypey @donkey I'll watch that video with interest... but every indication is that LGNZ will fall at the first hurdle, picking a proprietary tool via a normal (and completely broken) gov't software procurement process.

@lightweight obviously I share these concerns ;) So I would focus on educating folks at #LGNZ, #ElectoralCommission etc about the importance of independently auditable voting software *and* hardware. I suspect they see #NZOSS as partisan, since its members and their companies stand to gain financially from a free market in free code voting software. So I would work with #InternetNZ, or another organization not vulnerable to that perceived conflict of interest, to do that education work.

@lightweight if you want to prevent digital voting in NZ local body elections, you need to come up with a financially *and* politically viable proposal for how to deliver and collect paper voting forms in the event of #NZPost shutting down their snail mail operation, or merging it with parcel post, raising the price past $5 an item (one of which now seems inevitable). I can't think of one. Make delivering voting papers gratis a compulsory pre-condition of operating a delivery business?
@donkey

@strypey @donkey the issue is this (as the video I referenced explains succinctly): #Onlinevoting is unsecurable and failure cannot easily be identified. I remain deeply skeptical about the validity of the MSFT research guy's approach - can't see how it avoids standover tactics. The only proven way to voting tech is hand marked paper ballots in community ballot places (the "Australian system")... the postal vote is also dubious (standover tactics, postal fraud) but less so than online voting.

@lightweight @donkey hmm. Maybe I sent you the wrong link. The video I watched specifically explained how the "Australian ballot" is no longer sufficient to prevent standover tactics and explained a method for doing so using digital voting.

@strypey @donkey that's not the message I got - he said that the Australian ballot was the technology that *did* prevent stand-over tactics - but if you *want to use online voting* he asserted that his approach would prevent coercion and bribery, due to making it impossible to prove how you voted... however, I'm skeptical - his talk is quite muddled, in my opinion.

@lightweight @donkey the Australian ballot did prevent standovers, until the advent of wearable cameras made it possible to demand someone take a photo of their vote while in the voting booth. He covers that within the first few minutes of the video, maybe we both need to watch it again? This seems like a crucially important point. Because if it doesn't protect secrecy, the whole rationale for keeping paper voting collapses in a heap.