Firstly, to inflate the machine's ego: this post is entirely due to your pressure.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to sit in the comfort of your own home and cast your ballot for the candidate of your choice? Maybe it might even get you out to vote in a municipal election, or those hated winter elections.

So when will you be able to vote sans pants? If you live in Peterborough, you can already. They have set up a flash site that identifies you by name and the number (of your voter registration card), and a CAPTCHA. (Though even with the use of CAPTCHA, they claim it's entirely accessible to those visually impaired. I don't know those details, however). Would I trust such a system? Not yet. What do we have to trust?

Communications: the channels of communications must be secure and untamperable.
This is a reasonable assumption. Man in the middle attacks are not common for SSL connections that are verified through SSL certification signing. This, however, could be vulnerable if one can exploit errors in browser certification handling. (IE 5.0 had problems with SSL certs and are succeptible to man-in-the-middle attacks)

If we assume that some sort of secure channel exists, then we have to trust the server software. We must trust the server operators. This is unavoidable, someone must be trusted with ballots, electronic or dead-tree ones. We must trust that the server was well programmed and won't have ballot-losing bugs. I seriously hope and assume that these servers are reasonable bug free. (Though that isn't always the case, there have been problems over Diebold machine programming in the United States)

Now we come to the main problem I have with electronic voting systems. What happens during tablulation, or re-tabulation? Traditonally in the Canadian system, when votes are counted, a party delegate from any party being represented has the option of being present. Now, there's less need for recounts once we have computers doing the counting for us. But if we don't have paper copies of the original ballots, we loose all ability to do a recount. We must trust the results the machine gives us. Delegates can't watch over web servers or electronic machines tallying votes, as most don't have the expertise to monitor that kind of security. Counting pieces of paper, however, is simple and robust.

So what does that mean for when I'd start saying electronic voting is good enough to use? Once the machines/servers are available for peer review before the election, so that a delegate from each party could review the system. And once the machines are simple enough and tamper proof enough, that our current delegate system in each riding works, and normal people can monitor for tampering of voting machines. And once we have machines that print out a paper ballot that can be recounted just like any other ballot, to ensure that the machines are working perfectly. (And that this is done in the beginning, as well as random spot-checking to make sure, that this is the case).

But, as LeVar Burton always said. "But you don't have to take my word for it". Read it for yourself. Elections Quebec did a review of the current state of evoting, and determined that it's not quite ready for their province. Michael Geist's column in the Toronto Star Vote against online Voting goes through some of the recent probems with evoting, and the Canada Elections Act says that electronic voting cannot be used for any official vote federally until it gets approval in the House of Commons and Senate.