Paper Vote Canada

The First Minister was dazzled by dancing robots and shown the latest developments in electronic voting as he visited Scotland's oldest university.

Mr McConnell opened the Gateway and John Cole buildings, two state-of-the-art facilities at St Andrews University. About A£10 million has been invested in the buildings, which house the university's schools of management and computer science.

Staff and students from the computer science department showed the First Minister how the latest hi-tech electronic voting software could be used in future elections.

I think dancing robots should be mandatory for all grand events.

icScotland - McConnell tries out e-voting system

Indeed, I'll take dancing robots any day over daft Internet voting schemes.

[30 April 2003]

On the eve of the elections, a computer scientist in St Andrews is researching the possibilities of voting over the internet in the future.

Tim Storer, a Computer Science PhD student at the University of St Andrews is working with Microsoft under their studentship scheme to investigate Remote Electronic Voting over the internet. The system he is investigating could see the possibility of voters being able to vote from home or anywhere in the World via email or text messaging.

Tim began the £50,000, three year project with Microsoft last September, and will go to Washington this Saturday for a three week internship to inspect voting machines currently used there. The e-voting project is a combination of Tim’s main interests of politics (especially electoral history and statistics) and computer science.

from The Future of Voting?

T. Storer and I. Duncan, "Practical remote electronic elections for the uk," in Privacy, Security and Trust 2004 Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (S. Marsh, ed.), (Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada), pp. 41-45, National Research Council Canada, University of New Brunswick, October 2004. Best Student Paper.
[.pdf]

from the Digital Privacy, Security and Trust Group at the University of St. Andrews

www.getyourvoteon.ca
they are counting down to the May 17, 2005 provincial election in BC

Young people in British Columbia can now use their mobile phones to make their voices heard on key voter issues, thanks to a new mobile network developed by the University of British Columbia’s Mobile MUSE Project.

from Government of Canada Helps Youth “Get Their Vote On” With Groundbreaking New Technology

This is fine by me as long as they don't get some addled idea that we should vote using text messaging.

If you want to engage young people with flashy electronic gizmos that's fine, just remember that for the actual voting it must be on paper and counted by hand.

Here's what the CBC reported

Political organizers in British Columbia are hoping to use cellphone text messaging to get young people interested in politics.

The non-partisan group "Get Your Vote On" plans to blitz the cellphones of its young members with polls and alerts in anticipation of the May 17 provincial election.

The program is based on the idea that young people need to be engaged on their own terms, said group spokesperson Olive Dempsey. She thinks the future of democracy may rest with the cellphone.

"Democracy does not begin and end with a ballot box," said Dempsey.

"Democracy is about building democratic habits and it is about engagement and that is what we are going to be doing."

from B.C. group texting to raise voter awareness

George Washington University Experimental Networked Systems Lab E-Voting Resources wiki.