Jason Kitcat

On the flight back from Sweden yesterday afternoon I was treated to a free copy of The Guardian (not much of a perk, I know). There were two excellent articles by Michael Cross tucked in there. The first article explores where e-voting is in the UK, a not unreasonable question considering the pilots this year but very much paper-based pilots this year. Cross answers the question and also rather nicely mentions that e-voting is unlikely to fundamentally change the levels of engagement in e-democracy. He argues that the money for e-voting would be better spent on e-democracy for local engagement. I quite agree, but still we need to be careful, technology won't have much impact in motivating the disengaged… but it could engage those who already care about political issues.

The other Michael Cross article looked at m-government, in particular the use of mobiles for parking in…. Sweden! With high levels of mobile phone ownership in many European countries I see much more of this happening soon – particularly when strong security and authentication isn't needed. It's a good overview… and to add colour, here's a photo I took of the m-parking signs in Gothenburg!

In today's follow-up article The Times provides more detail on the allegations of fraud being bandied about over the postal ballots. We have stories of plastic bags full of ballots and tipp-ex being used to change votes. Oh dear, oh dear.

The Telegraph meanwhile has a leader article (password protected so I'm not linking to it) using this whole postal voting mess to justify the continuation of the House of Lords. It's true that they were the only ones to try and stop these pilots being on such a large scale. Still, not sure that it logically follows that elected senators wouldn't have been equally sensible…

The Times has a major article on the increasing number of allegations, and police investigations, related to fraud in the all-postal ballots. Really it doesn't matter if they're true or not – reports like this only work to further undermine confidence in our electoral system.

CIO.com has a truly excellent article on e-voting. It's US-centric but well balanced and it covers most of the issues, including usability which often gets forgotten.

A wonderfully understated little piece appears in Wired News today:

Florida Voter Purge

A list of 47,000 “possible felons” is set to be purged from Florida's voter rolls. Local elections supervisors want to make sure the list is accurate and no legitimate voters are disenfranchised in November. In the 2000 presidential election George W. Bush “won” by just 537 votes after five weeks of recounts and challenges in Florida. During the recounts, reports surfaced that people had been removed from voting rolls even though they were not felons, so officials are naturally a bit testy about the massive purge.
— Beverly Hanly

A bit testy… and so they should be. Greg Palast showed rather convincingly that much of the 2000 'purge' was deliberately done to remove people from a demographic likely to vote Democrat. In fact they think anything between 20,000-50,000 votes were stolen!

(Interesting that in 2000 they purged 57,000 votes and this year it's 47,000 – why so similar Jeb?)

I saw yesterday a BBC local news spot on how complex the postal ballots were in parts of the North West region where there were council elections in addition to the European Parliament elections. A presenter bravely went through the steps of detaching the identification form, signing it and getting a witness to do so, voting (using two different methods), folding and inserting into envelope A only the (huge) ballots – ensuring that a barcode sticker was showing through a window. Then Envelope A had to be placed in envelope B with the declaration of identity in such a way that an address label showed through a window. “Phew” exclaimed the reporter and the presenter back in the studio. I sighed too. That's just WAY too difficult.

Thankfully, according to the one my partner received in Lancaster, the European-only postal ballots in the North West region are much simpler without detachable bits and barcodes to show in windows. The declaration of identity was also simpler, but still required a witness, unlike the postal ballots piloted in Brighton.

It's hard to know how to interpret a BBC report that a man has been arrested in Oldham for attempted elections fraud. Oldham is in one of the regions testing all postal ballots for the June 10th elections.

Publicising an arrest in this way could be an effective deterrent. It could also indicate that the police are being more vigilant on these matters. Alternatively the massive scale of these pilots could be encouraging more casual and opportunistic fraud than we've previously experienced. More attempts at fraud might well increase the likelihood of somebody being caught red-handed, which is notoriously difficult with postal ballots.