Paper Vote Canada

I am not going to be blogging a lot about US election controversies.
I am more interested in the vulnerabilities of electronic voting systems to both technological and social "hacking".

Anyway,

Democrats allege e-voting problems in Ohio
from News.com January 6, 2005

Congress on Thursday certified President Bush as the winner of the November election, despite efforts by a handful of Democrats to stall the process by protesting alleged electronic voting irregularities in Ohio.

The main point is, electronic voting systems open an election up to a huge variety of challenges. Maybe the software didn't work. Maybe the hardware malfunctioned. And on and on and on.

How many times do paper and pen malfunction?

Falling participation rates in elections and referenda and the perception that many citizens are losing interest in politics are concerns common to many Council of Europe member states.

Some member states are already experimenting with e-voting, or electronically enabled voting as it is also known, in the hope that modernising their electoral methods and allowing voters to cast their vote via electronic voting machines or even from their PCs will increase participation as well as providing a quicker and more cost effective means of organising public consultations.

But if e-voting has the potential to bring about many benefits, it also carries with it certain risks. How to ensure the security and secrecy of the vote in this new environment? How to ensure that e-voting is accessible to all?

The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, entrusted the Multidisciplinary Ad Hoc Group of Specialists on legal, operational and technical standards for e-enabled voting (IP1-S-EE) with the task of developing a set of standards which could be used as a reference by member states considering the introduction of e-voting programmes. The Integrated Project “Making democratic institutions work” provided the Secretariat for this group.

These standards are set out in Recommendation Rec(2004)11 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on legal, operational and technical standards for e-voting, which was adopted by the Committee of Ministers on 30 September 2004 at the 898th meeting of the Ministers’ Deputies

www.coe.int/t/e/integrated_projects/democracy/02_Activities/02_e-voting/

This is old, but for the sake of completeness:

Washington Post E-Voting: Promise or Peril?

It includes some video.

Just a brief comment: I am going to look into the Ukrainian voting system, which I am fairly sure was paper-based.

I think the Ukrainian situation was one of the strongest cases showing the importance of being able to visually verify that elections were properly conducted.

I have been pretty busy with my work blog lately, but I will have some new postings soon.

I did recently update the Wikipedia entry with info on the Democratic Renewal Secretariat.