Month: March 2007

This week there have been four written answers in Parliament that attracted my interest:

Oliver Heald continues to be very curious about the pilots and asks for correspondence between the Electoral Commission and the Department of Constitutional Affairs. This was correspondence I was also interested in, I would love to see what was put in the library by the Commission.

Jonathan Djanogly is another Conservative asking ever more questions about the pilots. He asks Bridget Prentice how DCA will prevent malpractice and fraud and receives a mish-mash of an answer. We are told of 'independent experts' but they aren't named and no promise of their findings being published is made. Who are they? When did or will they check the systems? What does independent mean?

We are to be reassured because “All e-voting systems will also include audit processes and records to allow returning officers to have confidence that the number of votes cast electronically tallies with those cast.” This means very little indeed, how it could do such a check and what value it would be is questionable. It would be much better (and much harder) to check that votes are counted as voters intended.

Then Ms Prentice tells us that because electors will be able to provide a password of their choice the potential for credentials being stolen or misused will be reduced. Which is rather doubtful in my view. The password picked by the elector has to be sent to the election office, an obvious address for cherry-picking from the post. Furthermore these passwords will need to be entered into the system manually – so they'll be lying around, typed in by who (we don't know) and then stored in a central database ripe for the picking. Human picked passwords are going to be easier to brute-force guess also.

Finally we're told about the Electoral Commission's statutory duty to evaluate the pilots. Which is great and very welcome but completely unrelated to how DCA will prevent fraud.

Mr Djanogly also asks how DCA will prevent coercion and intimidation during Internet and telephone voting pilots. Good question. Once again Ms Prentice's answers seem slightly… adrift. Firstly she reminds us that electors can still vote in polling stations, but she doesn't specify if you can vote in a polling station if you think your e-vote has been compromised. E-voting isn't compulsory yet, but this doesn't stop those who do register to use remote voting methods from being open intimidation. So this doesn't really answer the question.

Next Ms Prentice helpfully tells us that electors will be using identifiers unique to them and that there will be no receipt to show to others how they have voted. But print screen, a photo of the computer screen or even an audio recording of the telephone vote would work as a receipt – there is no protection and receipts are possible. The unique identifiers don't protect from intimidation either – they just limit it to one vote that can be stolen at a time by intimidation.

Finally we are told of good links with local police being fostered to ensure allegations are properly investigated because they could result in prison or a fine. I do think that local authorities are already pretty closely linked to their own local police forces. Perhaps the threat of prison and a fine count as prevention through fear but nothing else in Ms Prentice's answers can be seen as prevention. This is because it's impossible to prevent coercion and intimidation of people voting remotely – which is why we invented monitored polling stations.

Mr Djanogly finishes up by asking if we could perhaps use the Northern Ireland postal vote application process for the rest of the UK. Ms Prentice tells us how popular postal voting has proven to be, which is the problem as it puts a large number of votes out there for stealing. Essentially the Government position is that, even after numerous recent convictions of postal vote fraud and a Council of Europe investigation, we're not as bad as Northern Ireland so let's carry on with just the minor tweakings of the 2006 Electoral Administration Act. Sir Alistair Graham is right when he says that DCA haven't even tried to balance participation with electoral integrity – they've just gone for participation at all costs.

• BBC News: Electronic count is 'way forward'
  Northern Ireland's chief electoral officer, Douglas Bain, has said that he hopes to introduce electronic counting to speed up his counts. For Mr Bain this May's Scottish elections, with nation-wide e-counting, will be the litmus test.

• OSCE: Election observer report on Dutch Parliamentary Elections, November 2006
  The Dutch elections in November 2006 were the first following 'We Don't Trust Voting Computers' demonstrations of the serious vulnerabilities in Nedap voting machines. The OSCE 'Election Assessment Mission Report' provides interesting reading including unusually strong words about the inappropriate secrecy and inadequate testing of e-voting systems.

• DCA: CORE – Response to Consultation
  I've been sitting on this one for a while but I've now finally had time to read most of it. The Co-ordinated Online Record of Electors (CORE) is interesting for many reasons but when it comes to e-voting, two in particular: Firstly CORE will provide for a national electoral register database which the government explicitly lists as enabling e-voting in the future. Secondly the key data format for CORE will be Election Markup Language (EML). My paper on EML's development can be read here.

• Open Rights Group: Election Watch 2007
  The Open Rights Group (disclosure: I'm their e-voting campaign co-ordinator) are calling for volunteers to help observe the e-voting and e-counting pilots this May. ORG and our volunteers will be submitted for Electoral Commission accreditation which offers greater access (and responsibility) than previously possible.

• Wired News/AP: Diebold may dump their e-voting unit
  Diebold weren't always in the voting business, they bought into it fairly recently, and given the trouble it's caused I'm not surprised to hear that they're considering dumping the unit to a private investor or competitor. Diebold's core businesses of ATMs and safes are not well served by the bad PR (self-inflicted, I might add) the election services unit keeps attracting. Diebold aren't the only e-voting provider with questionable practices and poor technology, they've just been much worse at dodging the bullets than some of the others!

• The Sun: Phone voting computers crash and don't count incoming calls
  When you phone or text a vote for one of these TV competitions an insider reports that the computers often crash. The calls are still received, and callers charged, but votes are not counted particularly at peak times. Because there's no voter verification there's no way of knowing that your vote has actually been counted. It's also very much not in the supplier's interest to admit that something has gone wrong. I'm not surprised that problems have happened but I am mystified that after so many years of such shows being popular that the computers still can't cope with peak numbers of callers.

• House of Commons: Home Affairs Select Committee evidence on secret ballots (1998)
  A rather interesting short transcript of evidence by academics to the committee regarding the UK's practice of non-secret ballots. The academics recommend going to fully secret ballots as the negative perception of numbered ballots alone is not worth the minimal benefits they offer, which are rarely used. (via Ideal Government)

It's very heartening indeed to see the wide coverage Sir Alistair Graham's call to halt the May 2007 e-voting and e-counting pilots has received.

Perhaps his key sentence in the entire speech was:

“It is a matter of serious concern that we are experimenting with insecure methods of voting when the current registration and absent voting procedures are so insecure.”

In other words, the current system has flaws (which I absolutely agree with and have said many times) and the new methods being piloted are insecure. Hence we should not double or triple the number of insecure channels of voting we are running, let us fix the current system and stick with it.

The ever-sharp folks over at Headstar have posted an excellent E-Government Bulletin report on Sir Alistair's statement, which thankfully I can now link to directly as they have started blogging their content. They quote a senior government official close to the Cabinet Office:

“Would we support e-voting on a larger scale, up to a region-wide level? Yes we would, if we thought they [election officials] could do it properly.”

This is very interesting indeed. It shows that before the pilots have been run there is, by default, a positive stance about e-voting within government. Furthermore the quote hints that perhaps the push for e-voting is coming from somewhere more central in government than just the Department for Constitutional Affairs. Interesting…

UPDATE via Ideal Government:
The Times: Ministers ignore e-voting fraud warning
The Times brings together Sir Alistair Graham's call to halt the May pilots along with the Electoral Commission's letter to Lord Falconer about the pilot applications into one. There are more hard-hitting quotes from Sir Alistair and while it is reported that DCA had requested changes to the problematic pilot applications, what the changes were hasn't been detailed.

• Dutch e-voting software provider holds elections to ransom asking for anti e-voting campaigner to be arrested
  Freedom of Information releases in The Netherlands have revealed bizarre demands and letters from Jan Groenendaal whose company writes the software that runs the software used for all Dutch Nedap machine based elections. Groenendaal also tries to force the Dutch government to buy his company and spouts of against the Irish Independent Commission on Electronic Voting. Very worrying behaviour by a key supplier.

• House of Commons debate on the Electoral System – 26/2/07
  As part of a Westminster opposition day when the Conservatives could set the agenda, the electoral system came under fierce debate. Many excellent points made by Oliver Heald (Con), Simon Hughes (LD), David Wilshire (Con) and George Galloway (Respect) which leave the ministers on their back feet. Apart from a few outrageous remarks it's a good read!

• New York Times: Lower voter turnout in States that require ID
  This story is more than the headline would lead you to believe. Minorities such as Blacks and Hispanics are much less likely to vote in an ID required state than other groups. (via Ian Brown)