Paper Vote Canada

The Nedap/Powervote system is to be used in local elections in Brest in March, and will be extended to a number of other constituencies for the European Parliament elections in June.

THE KOŠICE higher territorial unit and the city's technical university are preparing to run a test presidential election vote via the internet.

The city wanted to run a test vote in early February asking registered voters several questions, including whether they agreed that Slovak legislation should change to enable the e-vote.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 1:13 pm (0) comments /

California's reliance on electronic-voting technology came under renewed scrutiny Thursday when two state lawmakers unveiled a measure to create new safeguards and a voting-rights group urged voters not to rely on touch-screen machines in next month's election.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 1:08 pm (0) comments /

Mobile phones, digital TV, postal voting and that ubiquitous holy grail, the "worldwide interweb", will be at the disposal of a total of 6.5 million voters this year, taking Britain (or at least England) further away from what Robin Cook described as the "anachronism" of the pencil stub, and closer to the government's stated ambition of an e-enabled general election some time after 2006.

High-tech methods of voting via email and text message should not be used in next year's elections to local councils and the European parliament, a report warned today.

In Britain, enthusiasm for e-democracy (which includes e-consulting as well as e-voting) runs high in official circles. Last year's local e-voting pilot was the largest ever held, with 146,000 votes cast electronically. However, hopes for electronic voting in June's elections were complicated by the clash with European elections (apart from anything else, the need to include Gibraltar as part of south-west England).

The government is still committed to offering e-voting in a general election "some time after 2008". The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister last month began working with local authorities to set up a system of electronic electoral registers, essential if people are to vote electronically while outside their own constituency.

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Proportional representation, scrapping the permanent voters list and new rules for election advertising will all be on the table as part of a sweeping review of Canada's Elections Act announced yesterday.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 6:51 pm (0) comments /

In south Florida last month, an electronic-voting system from Election Systems & Software was used in a special election to fill a seat in the state Legislature. The election was decided by 12 votes. However, more than 130 voters cast blank ballots using the touch-screen system.

No one is sure why those ballots were blank. Speculation ranges from voters deciding at the last minute not to vote to software errors to voters failing to confirm their votes on the final screen. Normally, such a close election results in a recount. But without paper ballots or punch cards to check, there's nothing to recount.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 6:45 pm (0) comments /

In fact, it worked so well that [Markham CIO] Allen foresees potentially expanding the use of e-voting considerably in future elections.

"One of the options we're looking at -- and I'm not sure if we're going to go there -- is eliminating polls altogether," he says. "That's what some government agencies have done."

Voters could either vote over the Net or the phone, using IVR (interactive voice response) or SMS (short messaging service). Or, he adds, all polling stations could be connected to the Internet.

Q: How do we know that the vote as electronically reported was correctly reflecting what the individuals who voted actually did?

A: First, the system goes through a pre-testing process to ensure that all votes are cast and recorded correctly by the system. Then, during the election, each voter is presented with a review page prior to submission of the ballot. The system holds each individual ballot so that the voter can double-check to make sure the ballot accurately reflects voter intent.

Q: How is the electronic vote audited?

A: The system does not tally the votes but rather delivers the raw votes cast. Those votes are encrypted. The encryption key is kept by the local jurisdiction and is the only body that can access the votes and tally the results. The encryption process allows for seeding certain identified voters with a receipt trail.

This receipt trail allows for certain voters to review their individual votes prior to the tally in the system.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 6:40 pm (0) comments /

Federal government House leader Don Boudria said: "As minister responsible for the Canada Elections Act, electronic voting is of particular interest to me. Voting electronically addresses issues such as time and distance that sometimes prevent people from voting."

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Local Democracy and Services to Citizens

A municipality-run Internet portal can provide citizens with on-line access to council meetings and transcripts of council decisions as soon as meetings end. On-Line voting in municipal elections will be available, and citizens can have access to discussion sites where public comment is invited on municipal issues currently before council. All municipal permits, taxes and licenses can be paid on-line 24 hours a day.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 6:23 pm (0) comments /

Preliminary data collected from Internet voters revealed that 93 percent of respondents would be "very likely" to vote online again in a future election and 99 percent said that an interactive web site will be helpful in future elections. This unprecedented research is funded in part by the Applied Research in Interactive Media (ARIM) Program, a joint program between CANARIE Inc. and the Department of Canadian Heritage.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 6:03 pm (0) comments /

About 25% of the US electorate is expected to vote electronically in this year's November presidential election. This is up from around 15% in 2000.

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But Professor David Dill from Stanford University told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science the switch may actually make things worse.

"The problem with electronic voting is your votes disappear into the electronic machine and there is no independent way to check that those results are valid," said Professor Dill.

"I know that I am not going to have a lot of confidence in the vote totals reported by those machines unless there is some independent polling or whatever that is consistent with that."

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 4:25 pm (0) comments /

The opportunities for fraud are endless. In the 2002 leadership race, which was conducted by mail, Samantha the cat was the least of the party's problem voters. Former Rhinoceros Party leader Charlie McKenzie purchased a mail-in ballot legally, and then proceeded to auction it off on EBay. Mr. Mackenzie was reported to have stated that the sale was "an experiment in democratic capitalism," and was paraphrased by reporter Jill Vardy as saying that the ballot auction was "a gentle jab at a political system run by money."

Switching from mail-in ballots to telephone or Internet balloting does not solve the problem.

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If the leadership election organizing committee chooses any form of voting that does not involve every single voter physically turning up at the polls or (in the case of shut-ins) being visited at home by a party official, it is entirely possible that the leadership of the new party will be decided on the basis of fraud.

Even if this disaster is avoided, it is a virtual certainty that at least some of the ballots cast for the new leader of the party will have been cast fraudulently...

The committee must ensure that every such loophole is firmly shut and is transparently beyond any form of tampering.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 4:07 pm (0) comments /