“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 so on. 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 as ordinary citizens could know that a proposed online voting process was trustworthy.”