Category: voting

• BBC News: Electronic count is 'way forward'
  Northern Ireland's chief electoral officer, Douglas Bain, has said that he hopes to introduce electronic counting to speed up his counts. For Mr Bain this May's Scottish elections, with nation-wide e-counting, will be the litmus test.

• OSCE: Election observer report on Dutch Parliamentary Elections, November 2006
  The Dutch elections in November 2006 were the first following 'We Don't Trust Voting Computers' demonstrations of the serious vulnerabilities in Nedap voting machines. The OSCE 'Election Assessment Mission Report' provides interesting reading including unusually strong words about the inappropriate secrecy and inadequate testing of e-voting systems.

• DCA: CORE – Response to Consultation
  I've been sitting on this one for a while but I've now finally had time to read most of it. The Co-ordinated Online Record of Electors (CORE) is interesting for many reasons but when it comes to e-voting, two in particular: Firstly CORE will provide for a national electoral register database which the government explicitly lists as enabling e-voting in the future. Secondly the key data format for CORE will be Election Markup Language (EML). My paper on EML's development can be read here.

• Open Rights Group: Election Watch 2007
  The Open Rights Group (disclosure: I'm their e-voting campaign co-ordinator) are calling for volunteers to help observe the e-voting and e-counting pilots this May. ORG and our volunteers will be submitted for Electoral Commission accreditation which offers greater access (and responsibility) than previously possible.

• Wired News/AP: Diebold may dump their e-voting unit
  Diebold weren't always in the voting business, they bought into it fairly recently, and given the trouble it's caused I'm not surprised to hear that they're considering dumping the unit to a private investor or competitor. Diebold's core businesses of ATMs and safes are not well served by the bad PR (self-inflicted, I might add) the election services unit keeps attracting. Diebold aren't the only e-voting provider with questionable practices and poor technology, they've just been much worse at dodging the bullets than some of the others!

• The Sun: Phone voting computers crash and don't count incoming calls
  When you phone or text a vote for one of these TV competitions an insider reports that the computers often crash. The calls are still received, and callers charged, but votes are not counted particularly at peak times. Because there's no voter verification there's no way of knowing that your vote has actually been counted. It's also very much not in the supplier's interest to admit that something has gone wrong. I'm not surprised that problems have happened but I am mystified that after so many years of such shows being popular that the computers still can't cope with peak numbers of callers.

• House of Commons: Home Affairs Select Committee evidence on secret ballots (1998)
  A rather interesting short transcript of evidence by academics to the committee regarding the UK's practice of non-secret ballots. The academics recommend going to fully secret ballots as the negative perception of numbered ballots alone is not worth the minimal benefits they offer, which are rarely used. (via Ideal Government)

It's very heartening indeed to see the wide coverage Sir Alistair Graham's call to halt the May 2007 e-voting and e-counting pilots has received.

Perhaps his key sentence in the entire speech was:

“It is a matter of serious concern that we are experimenting with insecure methods of voting when the current registration and absent voting procedures are so insecure.”

In other words, the current system has flaws (which I absolutely agree with and have said many times) and the new methods being piloted are insecure. Hence we should not double or triple the number of insecure channels of voting we are running, let us fix the current system and stick with it.

The ever-sharp folks over at Headstar have posted an excellent E-Government Bulletin report on Sir Alistair's statement, which thankfully I can now link to directly as they have started blogging their content. They quote a senior government official close to the Cabinet Office:

“Would we support e-voting on a larger scale, up to a region-wide level? Yes we would, if we thought they [election officials] could do it properly.”

This is very interesting indeed. It shows that before the pilots have been run there is, by default, a positive stance about e-voting within government. Furthermore the quote hints that perhaps the push for e-voting is coming from somewhere more central in government than just the Department for Constitutional Affairs. Interesting…

UPDATE via Ideal Government:
The Times: Ministers ignore e-voting fraud warning
The Times brings together Sir Alistair Graham's call to halt the May pilots along with the Electoral Commission's letter to Lord Falconer about the pilot applications into one. There are more hard-hitting quotes from Sir Alistair and while it is reported that DCA had requested changes to the problematic pilot applications, what the changes were hasn't been detailed.

• Dutch e-voting software provider holds elections to ransom asking for anti e-voting campaigner to be arrested
  Freedom of Information releases in The Netherlands have revealed bizarre demands and letters from Jan Groenendaal whose company writes the software that runs the software used for all Dutch Nedap machine based elections. Groenendaal also tries to force the Dutch government to buy his company and spouts of against the Irish Independent Commission on Electronic Voting. Very worrying behaviour by a key supplier.

• House of Commons debate on the Electoral System – 26/2/07
  As part of a Westminster opposition day when the Conservatives could set the agenda, the electoral system came under fierce debate. Many excellent points made by Oliver Heald (Con), Simon Hughes (LD), David Wilshire (Con) and George Galloway (Respect) which leave the ministers on their back feet. Apart from a few outrageous remarks it's a good read!

• New York Times: Lower voter turnout in States that require ID
  This story is more than the headline would lead you to believe. Minorities such as Blacks and Hispanics are much less likely to vote in an ID required state than other groups. (via Ian Brown)

It is to the Electoral Commission's great credit that they have published a letter they wrote to Lord Falconer, the minister in charge of the Department for Constitutional Affairs. The letter details the Commission's response to the applications made by local authorities to run electoral pilots in May 2007. It makes for very interesting reading, here are some highlights:

• The Commission feels that many applications lacked detail and that short timescales also prevented the Commission from assessing the applications in detail.

• Due to insufficient detail, probably due the procurement timetable preventing authorities knowing which suppliers they could use, the Commission could not support any of the e-counting pilot proposals – yet six were approved by DCA.

• Several of the e-voting pilot applications 'demonstrate insufficient understanding of the important security issues relating to electronic voting'.

• Three applications, from Rushmoor, Sheffield and Swindon, showed 'effective project management and risk analysis'. These three have done e-voting before, the commission felt that the other four applications did 'not provide enough evidence to give us the confidence that the potentially significant risks involved in the schemes would be managed appropriately.' So the commission couldn't support the applications as proposed. Nevertheless Shrewsbury & Atcham and South Bucks were both approved by DCA to run e-voting pilots in addition to the three the Commission had supported.

Finally:

It was also of considerable concern to us that a large number of the applications were not able to demonstrate broad cross-party support for the proposed schemes. It will be absolutely essential to clarify the true level of local support before approving any of these applications, to ensure that risks to the successful delivery of the schemes are minimised. In particular, we are concerned that the administrative aspects of the election process should not become an issue of dispute in the election itself.

I know of at least one council that does not have cross-party support for e-voting which nevertheless was approved to run a pilot.

Opinion research done by BMRB for the Electoral Commission concerning attitudes surrounding the 2006 electoral pilots makes for interesting reading. The top reason for people possibly choosing not to vote in a pre-election survey: ‘disillusionment with politics, parties or the party system’. Post-election research showed that:

Although, practical reasons for non-voting were given in some instances, such as being out of town, working late or being ill on polling day, they were usually said to work in tandem with other barriers, such as political disillusionment, and were not usually seen as sufficient to act as a barrier on their own. Furthermore, practical barriers were not thought to have a prolonged impact on voting behaviour, that is, they did not result in persistent non-voting over a number of elections.

Three key barriers to voting were highlighted as:

• Lack of political understanding and knowledge;
• Disillusionment and scepticism of contemporary politics
• Party stronghold (thinking the result is a a dead cert).

So again Electoral Commission research shows that overall, while people do cite practical difficulties as part of the reason why they don’t vote, there are deeper reasons that stop people from voting and so technical quick-fixes like e-voting are not going to make a significant difference to e-voting.

It’s interesting to look back to section 9.3 of a 2002 BMRB report for the Department for Transport, Local Government & Regions on e-voting where turnout was discussed:

The implementation of electronic voting was felt to have a limited influence in connection with increasing turnout. In a small number of cases non-voters felt that the idea that electronic voting would increase turnout was insulting.

‘Surely, they’ve only got to look at themselves to say “hey, maybe it’s me”. They don’t think it’s them. They just think it’s because we’re too lazy to go and vote.’

Government sponsored reports, let alone others from people like myself, have been saying for years that e-voting won’t boost turnout significantly. They knew it in 2002, in 2006 and now.

The 2006 report also has an interesting chart that shows the priorities of public opinion (as sampled) for the voting process. Top priority was voting being secret (29%) and second was their vote being safe from fraud or abuse (26%). Then came choice of voting methods followed by convenience at 16% each then ease of voting (10%). So the top two priorities outweigh the next three by a 13% margin. From 2003 to 2006 the proportion of people who would prefer to vote from a polling station has risen 54.5% from 33% (2003) to 51% (2006). Furthermore 97% of voters in May 2006 rated polling station voting as easy to do, 97% rated polling station voting as convenient and 96% rated polling station privacy as good. It doesn’t sound like people are clamoring for methods of voting that replace the polling station at the risk of election integrity.

Indeed 43% of respondents to a pre-election 2006 survey felt that postal voting was unsafe. After the local elections 24% felt that electoral fraud had been a very or fairly big problem. 51% said fraud hadn’t been a problem and 21% didn’t know. This is extraordinary – a quarter of respondents felt that electoral fraud had been a major problem, that’s a huge chunk of people with little faith in the accuracy of our electoral system.

There’s no doubt about it, the public want vote secrecy and security ahead of convenience. Yet the 2007 pilots appear to reverse those priorities risking the secrecy and security for a bit more convenience – why and for who?

The full 2006 BMRB report

A summary of the 2006 report

The full 2002 BMRB report