Categories
e-democ / e-gov

Major Cities of Europe IT Users Group conference

The conference in Gothenburg (or Goteborg as they write in Sweden) has come to an end. Highlights included a fantastic presentation about m-parking in Zagreb, Croatia. They’re using SMS, GPS and GPRS for an integrated parking solution which lets people pay for parking with a single SMS, no registration, nothing. Then tow trucks and parking attendants are all connected to the system in real time along with a police database of stolen/interesting vehicles. Very impressive. Shame it only works for people with Croatian mobiles!

The final day was on e-democracy and apart from my presentation we had some really interesting presentations on applications in the UK (e-voting!), Spain, Finland and Denmark. None were getting massive numbers participating but they were trying hard. We really don’t know what does and doesn’t work in e-democracy yet which is why we need to keep experimenting. And as I said in my piece, Open Source can really help provide low cost ways of doing those experiments.

Categories
voting

Allegations of fraud in postal ballots pile up

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.

Categories
voting

CIO.com e-voting article

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.

Categories
e-democ / e-gov

theyworkforyou.com goes live

I'm about to jump on a plane to Sweden for my presentation at the Major Cities of Europe IT Users' Group conference. But I've just noticed (thanks to a T-Mobile hotspot – great aren't they?) that those cheeky chaps behind FaxYourMP.com have launched their new wonder TheyWorkForYou.com.

It's really superb. I don't have time to go into it in detail at the moment but do go take a look. I had a peek during the private beta phase and this is a very powerful new tool for activists. It won't help engage the disengaged, but it will empower those who already care. More later…

Categories
voting

Florida Purge Understatement

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?)

Categories
e-democ / e-gov

Links

The irrepressible Ian Brown has pointed me to another great link, this time a wonderful Guardian comment piece by David Clark. He's singing from the same hymn book as me, technocratic changes won't change the fundamental malaise in politics. He just says it better! Definitely worth a read, it's a great essay which romps through the issue of declining participation in modern liberal democracies.

Here's a link which shows that some people are thinking about how to be tactical with their use of existing technologies for e-democracy. Barnsley council have the simple, but brilliant, idea of emailing people the results of elections as soon as they're known. You can signup here. It's not far from the idea I had a few days back where I suggested people could get emailed to remind them of upcoming elections. Hopefully Barnsley will be smart in how they use this list of emails and leverage it to other users (once having asked the people's permission of course!).

Categories
voting

Postal Ballot Usability

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.

Categories
voting

Man arrested over suspected postal vote fraud

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.

Categories
voting

“You can forget legal challenges”

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.

Categories
voting

The Onion on e-voting

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?