Category: voting

The world's most widely read academic periodical on computing has dedicated its October issue to the issue of e-voting. I was honoured to be asked to help with this issue which was guided to completion by Peter G. Neumann (of RISKS fame), Rebecca Mercuri and Tom Lambert from ACM.

I contributed “Source availability and e-voting: an advocate recants” where I argue that open source e-voting software is not enough to ensure a secure, private and accurate election.

Full table of contents for the Special Issue

Michel Chevallier from the Geneva State Chancellery emailed me a press release announcing that without any special registration 22,000 Geneva citizens will be able to vote from anywhere online in six referenda on September 26th.

Personally I don't think technology is ready for such matters but Michel and the team in Geneva very strongly feel that e-voting is the way of the future, especially with the preponderance of votes Swiss citizens encounter in their civic lives. The Geneva election is probably a world first as it uses only the standard voting credential citizens receive no matter which channel they use to vote.

The system is merely an SSL-based website, so how security and anonyminity are delivered is unclear. I've put the original PDF press release on this site as I can't find it anywhere else.

Following on from the Electoral Commission's report on the all-postal ballot pilots this year there is news that e-voting may be put on the slow burn, thanks in part to the Commission's view that all-postal ballots should no longer be held.

There was some pretty tame debate on the Commission's report in Parliament recently. Thankfully there was also a rather decent debate held yesterday (Thursday 16th) in Westminster Hall discussing the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee report on postal voting.

KableNet have put some rather selective quotes from this Westminster Hall debate together with a quote from the Electoral Commission to suggest that there will be no e-voting trials before May 2006 at the earliest. We shall see if this holds true but the new foundation model for multi-channel voting which the Commission wants to prepare will take time to develop and so such delays sound realistic enough to my ears.

In their Government Computing Weekly email the folks over at KableNet write:

This may be a problem for e-voting enthusiasts and for IT companies wanting to get a market going, but it is also bad news for the democratic process.

It's not that e-voting can improve turnout levels – the evidence on this is inconclusive – but what it does mean is that our election system only falls further behind the times.

If e-voting is ever going to work, and to provide what could be an extremely useful service for people, it needs much more testing. It was just this that the local pilots provided. Gaining public trust and confidence in e-voting will only have suffered a serious setback if the pilots don't go ahead.

Two problems with this view…

1. It assumes that e-voting one way or another is inevitable. We have seen from the all-postal pilots that just because something new is tried doesn't mean it will inevitably adopted.

2. The comment also seems to suggest that e-voting isn't happening anywhere else in the world. It is… the US presidential elections in a few months will be just one of many opportunities to learn about how hard it is to get e-voting right.

I'm very proud to announce that the excellent journal Information, Communication & Ethics in Society have published my article 'Government and ICT Standards: An Electronic Voting Case Study'.

It's in Vol 2, Issue 3 which I only just got hold of (having been so busy I haven't been into SPRU for a while). Please do support this journal by subscribing!

A rather breathless article popped into my newsreader today. The headline?

Richmond council is World first for internet voting

Hmmm. Right… give them a chance. Reading on…

Richmond upon Thames LBC are allowing residents the chance to vote online to help set the council agenda on key scrutiny issues. This will be the first time that internet voting has been used by a local authority in not only the UK, but in the World!

Oh dear, oh dear. Of course not only have other local councils used Internet voting in the past, but so have many other parts of this world of ours. Well still wanting to give some benefit of the doubt I click over to the voting page on Richmond's site. It's not even Internet voting, it's an online poll which anyone can participate in, not just residents. sigh

I'm all in favour of small, tactical e-democracy projects. It's a key theme of mine in presentations, but I also always argue for building low expectations. World firsts which are totally misleading do not help. Let's involve people in all levels of politics and democratic processes, but let's take the time to get the little things right too.

Further to my earlier entry that suggested that there might be email e-voting in this year's US presidential election. Slashdot has more on this story citing a New York Times oped piece on the matter which asserts that fax and email will both be allowable methods of returning votes from abroad.

Not only is e-voting by fax or email totally insecure but it completely undermines the secrecy of the ballot. How it can be legal for this to happen I'm not sure. It is also interesting to think what kind of conspiracy theory you can brew when one considers Republican ties to the military… hmm.

E-voting is proving to be an expensive affair all over the world. Solano County, California has just spent $415,000 getting out of their contract with Diebold so they can get optical-scan systems from ES&S for the bargain price of $4.2 million.

Meanwhile in the Republic of Ireland, Martin Cullen (the minister responsible for trying to push e-voting) has several groups after his head for spending €42 million on e-voting and associated publicity costs. Yesterday there was a call to refer the spending to the Comptroller and Auditor General as a misuse of public money. Key to this is that:

The day before e-voting was halted, €1.1m was spent on PR and advertising, yet the final bill was €3.3m. The contract was awarded to a consortium led by a firm described as “friends of Fianna Fáil”.

Today the Electoral Commission published their report 'Delivering Democracy' along with a series of regional reports covering the regions that pilot all-postal ballots during the European elections in June.

The report is as refreshingly frank as one could ask from such a body. It starts by quoting some 2003 MORI polling that found that:

“There is a substantial segment of the population who make a decision not to vote for reasons of political disconnection… for this group, the mechanics of the voting process is not a critical factor, and even though they may recognise that the new arrangements offer advantages in terms of simplicity and convenience, this alone will not encourage them to vote.”

To cite such a comment shows how the Commission's attitude is changing. Not that long ago we had polls being cited showing how many additional people would vote if we introduced new channels, such as e-voting.

The report focusses on ensuring that voters feel confident in the security and accuracy of elections. As a result all-postal voting is not recommended but postal voting on demand is supported. The Commission makes some other excellent recommendations including that post-election audits of items such as declarations of identity should be mandatory under law. It's stunning that such audits aren't already required.

In gentle words the Commission also repeatedly chastises the government for the ridiculously short timescales that keep being forced on returning officers to implement these pilots. The report also surprisingly (in a good way) recommends further development of election markup language (EML) for postal ballot production. This is a usage we definitely envisaged when drafting the standard.

Overall an excellent report.

Additionally the Commission has released a short statement on the implications of their report for the regional assembly referenda. It's again quite tough on the way the government has been rushing things. To be fair on the returning officers who are already planning the all-postal North East referenda the Commission has recommended that they continue. But the commissioners wash their hands of any ensuing mess:

“Nothing in this statement should be interpreted as offering reassurance that, even if the actions above are taken, the referendum procewill be risk free or secure a high degree of public support.”

Other regional assembly referenda should not be conducted with all-postal ballots, the statement concludes.

The BBC Online has an article on the report which quotes Lib Dems gloating over how the government has been chastised. To be honest I think all local activists, no matter which party they come from, are happy to see the Commission support their doubts over all-postal voting. The article also has several parties up in arms about the recommendation to keep the North East all-postal but I just don't see any other option. The North East is a low risk, low population region and there's no time to change.

There's also quite a detailed article on Guardian Politics online.

If this anecdotal report via Boing Boing is true then things are much worse than we could have thought. Voting via insecure email is being proposed…[massive sigh]

There's a chapter on e-voting available to download over at Extreme Democracy. I haven't read it all yet but so far so good.