Petition for online overseas voting signed by 26,000 sent to Japan

Hayashi pointed to challenges such as preventing double voting and ensuring ballot secrecy and information security,

In other words, we have no proper IT skills.

An online petition with about 26,000 signatures was sent to Japan's foreign minister on Monday, demanding that Japanese nationals living overseas be allowed to vote in national elections via the internet.

How old those people who provide signatures young people or old people, if it's not old people chance is they just won't care, since young people just fraction of voter in Japan.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Japan-election/Young-voters-feel-unrepresented-by-politicians-in-aging-Japan

Online voting is a terrible idea. It seems really easy, but it isn't. If you don't see all the foreign interference possibilities, you are not informed. There is NOTHING. NOTHING that can be done to ensure internet voting can be performed safely. It just isn't possible.

The first challenge is to ensure that a massive Distributed Denial of Service, DDoS, attack wouldn't take the voting servers off-line. Around 2010, the entire country of Myanmar had all their outside internet connectivity blocked by DDoS from outside. Huge corporations have been taken offline by unhappy crackers. USGovt websites have been taken offline similarly. It is very hard to ensure any websites are available for use, only by the people allowed access and nobody else.

Online gambling companies will have their largest DDoS attacks during the next few weeks to prevent betting on the US Superbowl. The gambling sites will have hundreds of experts working from now until the last bet is taken trying to prevent any impact. They will have TBps of bandwidth and it still won't be sufficient for some of the DDoS attacks. In 2021, DDoS attackes in the 2.5 TBps ranges have been happening much more regularly. Clourflare, Microsoft, Google have all been targeted.

Read more here: https://www.wired.com/story/yandex-ddos-fortinet-passwords-security-news/ about Yandex. Wired is a pseud-IT article publisher. The Yandex was only 22M tps, so not really that much by western standards.

OTOH, using snail-mail from outside Japan to approved Council locations in the current country (outside Japan) would be relatively easy to secure ... except in places where the mail is routinely stolen (cough - India).

There just isn't any way to secure voting online. BTW, you shouldn't think that spending money online are 100% secure either. Those transactions happen quickly enough and are spread over millions of servers, so that attacking any one of them is only a minor problem. Japan can't through millions of servers at online voting. Really, voting online in an ideal, trusted, world, would only need a few servers. They could easily handle the transactions, but it is about all the things that can go wrong and cracking attempts which make this problem unsolvable.

That effort for developing the necessary IT structure for those some global votes makes not much sense and those few people also won’t have any significant influence on the outcome of the elections, even if they would theoretically unified vote for the contrary political block. In practice their potential votes will be quite similarly distributed over the different parties and non-voting and not valid voting clusters like the normal rest , the big majority of voters within the country.

An online petition with about 26,000 signatures was sent to Japan's foreign minister 

Which means he hasn't and probably never will see it.

It isn't on paper on his desk.

Good Luck... However that could mean more votes for opposition... So LDP won't allow it to happen.

If they are paying taxes to Japan they deserve a vote much like the PR living in Japan.

If they are paying taxes to Japan

They aren't. Only America and I think one other country require their citizens to pay taxes on income earned while living overseas.

they deserve a vote much like the PR living in Japan.

PR holders don't have a vote in Japan.

How about fax?

DDoS of phone lines happens all the time. In the US Democratic Primary in 2019, their phone banks were all DDoS'd by unknown people whlie their servers for smartphone counts were also DDoS'd. Phone lines are always oversubscribed. ALWAYS.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app-debacle-is-one-of-the-most-stunning-it-failures-ever.html has the layman's version of the story.

The USA has 116,990 election locations. Hard to DDoS that, since physically going to each on-the-day is impossible.