A crucial principle which should be applied to #onlinevoting discussions: scrutineering. At present, we can be confident that elections in voting stations with booths are fair and uncorrupted because people of all sorts, with many different interests (laypeople) are *capable* of credibly scrutineering the process. As soon as you go online, credible scrutineers drops to a tiny, specialised sliver of tech experts. Who are, therefore, easy to co-opt/corrupt/bribe/bamboozle. 1/2

In Germany, where they know a bit about how democracy can be corrupted, they have set a very powerful (& sensible) precedent, that electronic & #onlinevoting are *unconstitutional* - that is *because* laypeople (and voters!) cannot scrutineer the process. We need to think about this very carefully, and I think NZ should follow their lead in principle (even without a formal constitution). https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-rules-e-voting-unconstitutional/a-4069101

@lightweight as I am head of an polling station in Germany since more than a decade, I support that. I love control of many eyes for every vote, the double check of manual counting and the decision process for votes that do not match the 100% clear vote, that tries to identify the intention of the voter. After that, the pre-results are handed over to a central office by phone. They also process the individual results and do a check. Then the ballots and protocol are stored.

@vilbi thanks for letting me know! We're dealing with a lot of people here in NZ who think that online voting is the secret to improving voter participation. I believe they're quite wrong...