Category: voting

For a change from the US election fever, a couple of reports from Europe…

• France has been taking a softly, softly approach to e-voting. Most recently they've piloted a system (developed by EADS oddly enough) for use in professional elections.

• The E-POLL project has run a pilot in Italy and another is due in France soon. It's led by Siemens (where are the companies who know about voting in all these projects?!?!) and incredibly buzz-word compliant. I quote ” Its main concept is the re-engineering of the entire voting processes using cutting edge technologies such as wi-fi, intranet, smartcards, biometrics, and GPRS.” Great.

Boing Boing has two good posts on voting problems in the US of A.

1. Reader Brian Nicks had a bona fide error when voting with a DRE machine. And he even managed to snap the error with his phone camera and get a camera crew to film it. Nice. Link

2. Another reader, Kent Brewster, had a rather disturbing time when he asked to vote on paper (as he is allowed to do). The post says it all but it sounds like people choosing to avoid the electronic systems are being given an intentionally hard time. Link

A whole pile of US e-voting experts have started blogging on the US election.

I think they'll have a busy few days. I don't think there will any better place to watch how the technology of the presidential election performs.

e-voting experts RSS feed

The Electoral Reform Society's Lewis Baston and Ken Ritchie have released an excellent report 'Turning out or turning off?' which examines the issues surrounding political disengagement, particularly as expressed through low voter turnout. It's a really great piece, easy to read, well informed and it covers all the main issues from compulsory voting to the role of the media.

They argue that e-voting should continue to be gently piloted but that the 2006 target for an electronic general election should abandoned. Hurrah!

The best idea in the report, in my view, is that major election days should be public holidays. Let's have a sense of occasion… marching bands, flag waving, fun fairs, fancy dress – the works. Then people will know that the election is happening, that it's important and that loads of people care because they're out there celebrating their vote.

As the report says…

Some have argued that in Britain we work too hard and should have more public holidays. If we are to move in this direction, surely there is a case for not more bank holidays but for elections holidays – a day off work giving people time to exercise their democratic rights.

Not only would this be fun… but we wouldn't need to create e-voting or postal voting systems for busy people, we could all relax and walk together to our polling station. Who's in?

The report can be downloaded from the ERS website [PDF]

First reports of e-voting problems have begun rolling in from Florida. The game is afoot and it won't be long before troubles are being found across the states. I won't be exhaustively posting to each news item in this blog. Others are doing it so well there's no point repeating the effort.

Check out: * Kim Alexander's Blog RSS feed * Louise Ferguson's Blog RSS feed

and you'll be set for the election.

I will, of course, post my thoughts and comments as big issues arise. It's sad because the US election already feels like watching a horrible car pile up you know is going to happen all in very slow motion.

The details are sketchy to say the least but Silicon.com is reporting that the Greater London Authority is looking to introduce e-voting for the mayoral elections in 2008 This would be a major leap from their current use of electronic counting of paper ballots. Silicon.com state that all channels are being considered (the Internet, telephone, mobile phone, text messaging, e-voting booths and digital TV). If a by-election or referendum popped up before 2008 then they might use the systems early. Lucky London.

The article notes that the counting contract alone cost £5m this year. That’s a lot of taxpayer cash for what?

Unfortunately a leader by Silicon.com raises some of the cost and security issues but argues that we will have to embrace e-voting. Why? Let me quote the final part of the leader in full:

But this is a technology which has to be embraced and the scepticism which surrounds all voting means we should be building in a fairly high tolerance to criticism threshold.

By 2008 the technology and the means of identity verification should be robust enough to guarantee a fairly flawless e-voting system.

We have to hope the knowledge and the implementation process also doesn’t let it down.

Because underpinning any e-voting rollout is the obvious fact it is a government IT project – and enough has been written in the past about the fact that is almost a by-word for ‘over budget, over time and flawed’.

So risking going over-budget with precious tax money is ok because we must embrace the technology? Hmmm. Perhaps by 2008 the major problems with e-voting will have been addressed. Perhaps. But the Greater London Authority is buying the voting systems this or next year so they will have yesterday’s technology tomorrow. Not good.

CNET News.com has published an interesting illustrated roundup of e-voting around the world.

I like the fact that they've reported on how the Australian system is going back on its Open Source commitment. It just shows, as I say in my Communications of the ACM article, open sourcing isn't enough and isn't guaranteed.

The Association for Computing Machinery have finally made a strong political statement against e-voting without a paper trail. The British Computer Society are going through a similar journey to the ACM, learning that they can and should get involved in policy debates. Why it took the computer societies so long to get political compared to other learned societies I don't know.

NMK/IPPR are hosting 'E-Voting: Policy and Practice' in London on 4th November. Lots of interesting people will be speaking: Stephen Coleman, Louise Ferguson, the director of policy at the Electoral Commission (Nicole Smith) and Jonathan Briggs from Kingston University. Oh, and me!

More info and signup

Yes, it's a dumb PR gag, but I like it!

Bev Harris got a chimp to change the audit log on a Diebold system.