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2025 44th Ontario general election (Feb 27, 2025)

ARG1 said:
As a software engineer, there is nothing more frightening to me than the idea of electronic voting of any kind. You can think that your system is "secure" or whatever (real world tests usually prove that they aren't), but the reality is that even if there's a minor chance of it happening, the last thing we want is to give a country like Russia the opportunity to hack and rig the election. Every day I thank the lord that ElectionsCanada insists on using traditional paper ballots, and nothing more.
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Same. It's bad enough that some jurisdictions use machines to count paper ballots.
 
ARG1 said:
As a software engineer, there is nothing more frightening to me than the idea of electronic voting of any kind. You can think that your system is "secure" or whatever (real world tests usually prove that they aren't), but the reality is that even if there's a minor chance of it happening, the last thing we want is to give a country like Russia the opportunity to hack and rig the election. Every day I thank the lord that ElectionsCanada insists on using traditional paper ballots, and nothing more.
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I like electronic counting of paper ballots.

I see that as the right mix of efficient, with traceability.
 
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chrisw said:
Bonnie Crombie’s Transit Plan for the GTHA

View attachment 632671

Bonnie Crombie’s Transit Plan for the GTHA

The official site of the Ontario Liberal Party
ontarioliberal.ca
Click to expand...

GO to London or rather commuter rail to London, who cares about the brand, has its place, but not as London to Toronto, but as London to K-W.

Most of the rest is fine.

The Barrie Line going to Collingwood I see as logical, in the long term, though the direction of travel they've shown doesn't make much sense to me.

But again, important to pack it correctly . Toronto to Collingwood is a tourist ski/golf/bike train, and primarily weekends/holidays.

Collingwood to Barrie or K-W to the south (different ROW) is more of the commuter/local access to healthcare service}.

There is absolutely an issue w/showing these as if they could all be initiated in the next 4 years.......they can't.

There's nothing wrong with a longer planning horizon, but that shouldn't be misleading.

Detail in text form:
1740366985659.png
 
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ARG1 said:
As a software engineer, there is nothing more frightening to me than the idea of electronic voting of any kind. You can think that your system is "secure" or whatever (real world tests usually prove that they aren't), but the reality is that even if there's a minor chance of it happening, the last thing we want is to give a country like Russia the opportunity to hack and rig the election. Every day I thank the lord that ElectionsCanada insists on using traditional paper ballots, and nothing more.
Click to expand...
Here’s some food for thought – moving from paper to electronic doesn’t necessarily have to mean online. Using air-gapped, security-hardened systems at polling stations would invalidate most of your concerns while saving tons of waste.
 
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Northern Light said:
I like electronic counting of paper ballots.

I see that as the right mix of efficient, with traceability.
Click to expand...
Electronic counting I'm a bit mixed on. On one hand, there is definitely fewer vectors that can be used to affect the counting mechanism, but on the other hand it definitely does feel safer to have a panel of scrutineers observing each individual count, rather than trusting the output of a machine and hoping it wasn't tampered (not really that big of a concern since manual recounts are a common occurrence for contested tallies, but it is something).
reinventingthewheel said:
Here’s some food for thought – moving from paper to electronic doesn’t necessarily have to mean online. Using air-gapped, security-hardened systems at polling stations would invalidate most of your concerns while saving tons of waste.
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First, the person I responded to was outright advocating for online voting so that people could vote over the internet, specifically so that people wouldn't have to go to a polling station to vote. That being said if we are talking about electronic voting in person, that's still a cause for concern. You can't hand-wave security regarding voting booths by describing them as "security-hardened" since that's very much ill defined, and with something like electronic voting there are so many vectors of attack that even a minor case of complacency at one polling station has the potential to significantly alter results. Some key questions include: Whose voting software do we use to do the tally? Who's hired to develop the software and how do we trust they didn't sneak some secret backdoor? How do we properly verify that the software doesn't have exploits that can be targeted by foreign agents (don't try to respond to this question with some easy answer such as white box testing or inspection, those are far from fool-proof methods of truly securing a system), how do we make sure that the correct version of a software is installed on every machine (the idea for instance that there's a last minute hotfix to fix some vulnerability, but not all polling stations get around to installing that patch seems very likely), how do you make sure that the software installed on a machine is even authentic and not some bootleg that someone quietly installed whilst no one was looking (don't say checksums, those can easily raise a different set of eyebrows), and this is just scratching the proverbial surface. Now even assuming you somehow figure out an answer to all of these questions and have developed some mythical ultra-secure setup, we now pop up with 2 more questions. 1) How much will this entire ultra-secure setup cost in terms of procuring these ultra-secure machines for the entire country to use, and do you believe that cost will justify "improvements" such as "not using as much paper", and 2) the previous issue described already in this thread of actually making the entire country believe that your system is as secure as you believe it is, and explaining how your security system works. If there are enough people to doubt that the election is free from significant fraud, it really doesn't matter how secure the system is - your system is now a massive PR timebomb ready to blow at the slightest provocation.
 
ARG1 said:
As a software engineer, there is nothing more frightening to me than the idea of electronic voting of any kind. You can think that your system is "secure" or whatever (real world tests usually prove that they aren't), but the reality is that even if there's a minor chance of it happening, the last thing we want is to give a country like Russia the opportunity to hack and rig the election. Every day I thank the lord that ElectionsCanada insists on using traditional paper ballots, and nothing more.
Click to expand...
But there's another subtle argument on behalf of "traditional" balloting over electronic balloting; and it's less about the cited risks involved, than about the data it provides.

Because what's happened in jurisdictions that have taken to electronic balloting is that the traditional polling map--one where a riding could have a whole flurry of polling subdivisions--has been displaced by one where there's only a lumbering series of "megapolls".

And that is catastrophic for political operatives who want their political geography broken up into compact, manageable parcels, both for canvassing purposes and for the granular detail it provides, the block-by-block patterns where one can discern how certain "spot conditions" can affect how a certain segment of geography votes--it's the kind of political-geography data that can fruitfully inform future campaigning *and* extra-political purposes; it offers a fine-grain idea of the lay of the electoral land, fueling an "electoral psychogeography", if you will.

To know what I'm talking about, click on any riding on this site
click on the "Poll-by-Poll" prompt, and compare the maps up to 2014, to those since 2018. And consider how much more satisfying the maps up to 2014 are in conveying that beneficial sense of "electoral psychogeography".

Likewise, Alberta up to 2019, vs 2023.

Explain it to me: how is that *good*?

Or would you rather have a utopia where there are no more polling booths or subdivisions and everybody votes electronically, and the only data available is that for the whole riding?

Just because any of you might be idiots who are indifferent to the existence of such data doesn't mean you have to project such idiocy upon others.
 
@ARG1 I’ll concede as there are better points of discussion to be had here, days ahead of an election.

Your latter two questions about justifying cost and public trust are leading concerns. The cybersecurity questions are far more trivial.
 
You could always ensure the accuracy of the tally by making voting results immediately public by the name of the voter.
That would be fun times! 😈
 
adma said:
Just because any of you might be idiots who are indifferent to the existence of such data doesn't mean you have to project such idiocy upon others.
Click to expand...
What about the idiocy of assuming that you wouldn't be able to still have granular data? There is nothing stopping politicians from legislating that virtual polling is still broken up into sub polls.
 
chrisw said:
Bonnie Crombie’s Transit Plan for the GTHA



Bonnie Crombie’s Transit Plan for the GTHA

The official site of the Ontario Liberal Party
ontarioliberal.ca
Click to expand...
uh, why did she wait to release this plan 3 days before an election?!? At this point people have started voting and most have made up their minds.
Just screams that the Liberals weren't ready for this early election even though there has been media speculation since early fall at least.
 
adma said:
But there's another subtle argument on behalf of "traditional" balloting over electronic balloting; and it's less about the cited risks involved, than about the data it provides.

Because what's happened in jurisdictions that have taken to electronic balloting is that the traditional polling map--one where a riding could have a whole flurry of polling subdivisions--has been displaced by one where there's only a lumbering series of "megapolls".

And that is catastrophic for political operatives who want their political geography broken up into compact, manageable parcels, both for canvassing purposes and for the granular detail it provides, the block-by-block patterns where one can discern how certain "spot conditions" can affect how a certain segment of geography votes--it's the kind of political-geography data that can fruitfully inform future campaigning *and* extra-political purposes; it offers a fine-grain idea of the lay of the electoral land, fueling an "electoral psychogeography", if you will.

To know what I'm talking about, click on any riding on this site
click on the "Poll-by-Poll" prompt, and compare the maps up to 2014, to those since 2018. And consider how much more satisfying the maps up to 2014 are in conveying that beneficial sense of "electoral psychogeography".

Likewise, Alberta up to 2019, vs 2023.

Explain it to me: how is that *good*?

Or would you rather have a utopia where there are no more polling booths or subdivisions and everybody votes electronically, and the only data available is that for the whole riding?

Just because any of you might be idiots who are indifferent to the existence of such data doesn't mean you have to project such idiocy upon others.
Click to expand...
If we wanted to achieve that result, all we'd need to do is take all of the boxes from the various polling stations, dump all the ballots into one pile, and there you have your mega polling station. No need to potentially risk Man in the middle attacks or swapped/missing USB sticks.
 
GO line to Collingwood - oh be still, me beating heart! I've been asking for that for ages!
 
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