Jason Kitcat

So says Lord Charlie Falconer, minister in charge of the Department of Constitutional Affairs. Lord Falconer, as regular readers will know, is only the latest Labour minister to be wheeled out in attempts to calm the fuss over the all-postal ballot pilots. The minister's take?

The scheme is working well. I think we should regard this as something of a success – not, as it were, be carping on the edges.

But the fuss continues and the LibDems and Tories are fielding some humdinging soundbites such as Charles Kennedy's “democratic disgrace”. The latest is in this Guardian/Press Association report. Thanks to the FIPR's ever vigilant Ian Brown for the link.

Michael Williams passed me a link to a great little bit of Onionery on e-voting kiosks. You can view the pseudo infograph online here or avoid a rather annoying advert by viewing the PDF version directly.

They've beautifully mixed the real with the (hopefully) imaginary. Take:

Not enough outlets in most high-school gymnasiums to plug in machines

and then look at: Machines themselves get 26 electoral votes

Both in the Onion's graphic – which is true and which is a joke?

In the Guardian's continuing coverage of the all postal ballot troubles Sam Younger, chairman of the Electoral Commission, essentially implies that we may be losing post, but not votes in the run up to June 10th.

Younger's logic is irresistible: Postal ballots are huge potential source of new income for Royal Mail, as Mr. Younger says: This is so important for the Royal Mail's standing, so much depends on it, that my guess is they will bust a gut. So it will probably be all right. What it does to the rest of their deliveries I don't know… In other words, don't hold your breath for normal mail but somehow they'll get those votes through. How reassuring for voters and Royal Mail customers alike.

The New York Times magazine has an opinion article by Clive Thompson arguing for the use of Open Source software in e-voting systems. While it's nice to see the idea get some mainstream coverage (after I've been banging on about it since 1999) Open Source alone is not enough. I've got an article on this appearing in Communications of the ACM soon so I'll hold my fire. But in summary, source-availability does not alter the unique difficulties in providing secure and anonymous ballots. (UPDATE:VoteHere's Jim Adler has blogged on the NY Times article but seems to think that merely publishing the source of a voting system makes it Open Source)

On another note, TV viewers in the UK may have seen the wonderful adverts by the Electoral Commission promoting the June 10th elections. With the slogan “If you don't do politics, there's not much you do do” the adverts use a great animated style to highlight how so much of life, if not everything, is influenced by politics in one way or another. Unfortunately the website the adverts point viewers to, aboutmyvote.co.uk is truly disappointing. It looks rushed, poorly thought out and ugly. I'm always a bit cautious about single-use sites as they tend to get limited investment as everyone knows they've got a limited shelf-life. It would have been better to link to the half-decent main Electoral Commission website.

That said the Votes are Power site the Commission put together for their youth voting campaign (which had some not bad cinema ads) is pretty good. Still why can't visitors just knock their post code in to be told about elections & candidates in their area? Stick your email in and get reminders on upcoming elections for life. Simple, but I can't see anyone doing it.

A Guardian report shows how candidates are already getting jumpy, reaching for their lawyers, with the mounting troubles surrounding the all-postal vote pilots for the European Parliament elections.

The government claims these are normal difficulties but, as with e-voting, I anticipate confidence in the result will be undermined if reports such as this continue to emerge. And it will only get worse if some candidates do go to court over this.

The Guardian has a rather good article on problems with the postal ballots planned for the imminent European and Local elections. Everyone knew that logistically they would be a challenge and indeed it's no surprise to find problems arising. Thank goodness sense prevailed and e-voting was paused for this year – it would have been a fantastic mess otherwise.

The article is a little gung-ho on the pro-sides of e-voting, calling the Indian election a 'triumph' of e-voting when we know very little about how reliable the result is. Nevertheless a good article and thanks to Ian Brown at FIPR for the pointer.

UPDATE 28/5: 220,000 postal ballots have to reprinted in Stockport due to an unacceptable number of errors found in the ballot papers. BBC News Story

Whilst e-voting has been the focus of much of my work, postal voting is a clearly related electoral reform that I like to keep tabs on. I did an assessment of Brighton's pilot (under Postal Voting here) testing all-postal elections in May 2003.

All-postal votes undoubtedly boost turnout in the short term so it's not surprising to see a committee of MPs calling for changes to make postal voting easier. Unfortunately, as with e-voting, detecting postal fraud is difficult. Before we permanently introduce all-postal ballots I'd like to see more explicit discussion of just what measures are being taken to ensure postal ballots are secure. There are options such as digitally checking signatures against those held in the register… but we need to know about the measures, discuss them and analyse them. I fear a culture of security through obscurity is creeping in, It took a lot of work for me to discover how ballots in the Brighton pilot where checked.

As an additional little twist, some think postal voting contravenes the European Bill of Human Rights by removing the right to a secret ballot. I tend to agree, but will this matter to the government in the end when we already breach several treaty commitments by having unique numbers tied to our names on each ballot paper anyway?