Jason Kitcat

Months of work, 25 observers monitoring the elections, stacks of Freedom of Information requests and a lots of coffee. These are some of the ingredients that have gone into ORG's May 2007 Election Report.

When we began planning our observation mission we never expected for a moment that our observers would spot so many problems. But they did and we've had to follow them all up. The report details the serious technical, usability and procedural problems monitored in Scotland and England. It also provides some insight into the high level of spoilt ballots in Scotland.

You can download the report from here.

I know I've been harping on about the problems with e-voting and e-counting for a long time but I was still surprised by the scale and number of problems experienced last week in England and Scotland.

The Open Rights Group observers did amazing work with a huge number of sleepless nights racked up between us all. We're in the midst of collating the data from all the different areas we observed so that I can get down to writing our overall report, which is going to be much bigger and more detailed than originally planned. So blogging here will slow down for a bit while I plough through the data.

The report will be launched in London on June 20th so I haven't got long at all!

The Electoral Reform Society have for a long time failed to make a clear statement regarding their views on e-voting. In the past reports have mentioned some of the weaknesses inherent to e-voting but nothing definitive has ever been published by the ERS.

This has now changed as the ERS Council's latest report states:

Following a resolution at last year's AGM that was remitted to the Council, a policy paper on e-voting and e-counting was approved. The Council accepted that e-counting can have benefits, provided there are sufficient checks and safeguards, but that internet, text and telephone voting can, like postal voting, make elections more vulnerable to fraud.

The policy paper is due to appear on the ERS website soon. I warmly welcome the Society's willingness to add their voice to the consensus over e-voting's significant risks.

UPDATE: The policy paper is now online as a PDF.

DCA have published the statutory orders for the May 2007 pilots on their website. These orders are the changes to law required to support the new technologies and processes that will be used.

I've only had a brief look so far but two sections caught my interest.

The order for South Bucks states:

43A. Voting procedure for internet voting
…
(10) The voter must not be able to access the internet voting facility for an election once his vote at that election has been cast.
(11) A voter voting using the internet must vote without undue delay and must exit the polling website after he has voted.

Extremely odd. I guess for (10) when they say 'access' they mean actually log in because as it reads now visiting the voting website again after having voted would be a breach. As for (11)… why put this in and how on earth would they enforce it?

Stratford will be using e-counting and have the following in their statutory order:

46 Re-count
…
(4) In so far as the votes have been counted using the electronic counting system, the returning officer may treat a request for a re-count as unreasonable unless he has reason to believe that the system has not scanned the votes correctly.

I find this mind boggling. Of course there's plenty of wiggle room – 'returning officer may treat a request for a re-count as unreasonable'. So he doesn't have to but the guidance is clear, unless there's good reason to believe a malfunction occurred then requests for re-counts can be disregarded. There should be mandatory sample re-counts at all times along with mandatory complete re-counts if the victory margin is slim. Will anybody be checking the paper ballots at these e-counting pilots?

I also have to say that it's extremely poor that there was no notification of these orders being published. They just appeared on the DCA website, nothing on their homepage or elections homepage (last latest news is dated 29th January). The Electoral Commission's site has nothing on these orders being published either. I only found out about them by talking to electoral administrators.

There's an elections community that should be kept informed of such things, how hard would it be for DCA or the Commission to email us? Furthermore as these documents are law for the period of the May elections, there's a responsibility to make them available to candidates, party agents and the general public. The sharing should be better folks.

All the statutory orders on the DCA site

The Department for Constitutional Affairs' Contract Notice to supply e-voting and e-counting solutions for the pilots has some interesting bits of information.

The notice was dispatched 1st August '06 and published by an EU journal on 3rd. The closing date for a response was 1st September '06 and DCA were to notify candidates for negotiation on 18th September.

A month later on 17th October the notice requesting applications to run pilots from local authorities was published with a closing date of 17th November.

So, vendors had a month to prepare their initial proposals as did local authorities. I'm sure DCA notified favoured vendors and authorities before the official publication but strictly nobody should have been able to prepare their applications until the announcements were published. These were absurdly tight timescales for no good reason whatsoever. Either work should have started much sooner or they should have contracted for the next local elections, not this May.

DCA were very honest about their goals in the contract notice (emphasis mine):

The Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) is exploring changes in electoral procedures to make elections straightforward, efficient, secure and, above all, readily accessible to all electors.

So, here we have it in black and white. Sir Alistair Graham was right – DCA put participation ahead of all other considerations. It's written in their own words, here's how it looks in the original:

This Contract Notice was released after a request was made to the DCA, however DCA have not published it. So it is available to download here [PDF]