The Electoral Commission released its official evaluation of the 3 May electoral pilots in England this morning. Among their key recommendations, they advise that:

“no further piloting should take place in the absence of a robust, publicly available strategy that has been subject to extensive consultation.”

We’re pleased that the Commission has recognised the desperate need for public debate about the role technology might play in our electoral system. We’re also satisfied that the detail of the Commission’s reports on pilots in Bedford, Rushmoor, Sheffield, Shrewsbury, South Bucks, Stratford and Swindon confirm the experiences of our own election monitoring teams. But we’re disappointed that the fundamental challenges in using computers for elections have not been fully recognised by the report.

The Commission has produced detailed reports of each pilot area, as well as technical reports, and summary recommendation reports. You can download all of them from the Electoral Commission website. The Ministry of Justice will now respond to these reports and recommendations, although no timescale for this response has been set.

The Open Rights Group will be touring the Liberal Democrat, Labour and Conservative party conferences in the Autumn, when Jason Kitcat, ORG’s e-voting campaign coordinator, will be joined onstage by front bench MPs and representatives from the Electoral Commission, to debate the question “Should we trust electronic elections?“. Jason will also be appearing at the Green Party conference, and we are currently trying to secure an event at the Scottish National Party Conference too. But we need your help. Please help us get as many of your elected representatives involved in this debate, by writing personally to invite each of them along. We’ve provided guidelines on how to do this.

Last week, at the official launch of ORG’s report into e-voting and e-counting in the May 2007 elections, we invited MPs, civil servants and other stakeholders to come and listen to the findings of our observation mission. Joining Jason Kitcat on stage was Harri Hursti, computer security expert and star of Hacking Democracy, who has revealed a number of flaws in American voting systems. The event was expertly chaired by William Heath. Watch Jason and Harri in action.

Alun Michael MP, Andrew Miller MP and Jonathan Djanogly MP all joined the debate, and there were representatives from the Electoral Commission and the Committee on Standards in Public Life present. Unfortunately, and despite numerous invitations from ORG, neither the Ministry of Justice (formerly the DCA and the body ultimately managing the pilots) nor Bridget Prentice MP, the minister responsible, felt able to send representatives to the event.

The report got ORG its first mention in Hansard, as well as much media exposure at both the local and national level. Its findings will feed into the Electoral Commission’s statutory reports for Scotland and England (due August) as well as the Independent Scottish Review of the elections.

Thanks to all the volunteers who made the evening run so smoothly, to the Royal Academy of Engineering for being such excellent hosts, and, of course, to all our election observers for making the report possible in the first place.

Today ORG releases its report into the May 2007 elections in Scotland and England. The result of a huge team effort and planning which began late last year, the report provides a comprehensive look at elections that used e-counting or e-voting technologies.

As a result of the report’s findings ORG cannot express confidence in the results for the areas we observed. This is not a declaration we take lightly but, despite having had accredited observers on location, having interviewed local authorities and having filed Freedom of Information requests, ORG is still not able to verify if votes were counted accurately and as voters intended.

The report identifies problems with the procurement, planning, management and implementation of the systems concerned. But more fundamentally, given that problems were so widespread, the evidence supports the view the e-voting and e-counting technologies are not suitable for conducting statutory elections.

The report can now be downloaded from our e-voting pages.

Since our 3 May mission to observe e-voting and e-counting in the English and Scottish elections, the ORG e-voting team have been hard at work. The individual reports from our 25-strong volunteer team, as well as materials collected by Michael and Jason using Freedom of Information requests, have been turned into a sixty-page report which is on its way back from the printers now.

The report will be officially launched tomorrow night at the Royal Academy of Engineering. The event will include a presentation from Harri Hursti, computer security expert and star of Hacking Democracy, who has revealed a number of flaws in American voting systems. Spaces for ORG supporters are strictly limited, as we’re trying to attract as many MPs and civil servants as we can, but if you’d like to attend, please get in touch with Michael today (michael[at]openrightsgroup[dot]org).

A huge thank you to our entire team of Election Observers who went way beyond the call of duty in their work monitoring last week’s elections.

Our team found procedural and technical problems some of which, particularly in Scotland, have already been reported in the media. Each observer is preparing a detailed file which will be used in drafting our comprehensive report on these elections. The report will be launched on 20 June at the Royal Academy of Engineers, London.

In the meantime thank you for all your hard work team, and thank you to all the election workers, candidates and voters who made us feel so welcome.

Breaking news from the Scottish Electoral Commission - ORG can observe the election in Scotland! This is fantastic news, as not only is Scotland electing its Parliament this 3 May, the entire vote will be e-counted.

But we haven’t got much time - if you live in Scotland and would like to observe the Scottish elections as part of ORG’s ElectionWatch 2007, please sign the pledge now, indicating where in Scotland you can observe. And please download one of our registration packs - ideally you’ll need to post us your completed registration form by the end of the day today to ensure we can accredit you in time.

We’ve finally got video footage from two of our February e-voting events online. Thanks to Tim, Felix, Chad, Laurence, Gavin and Ryan for pulling this together, and to archive.org for the bandwidth.

Our guide to registering to become part of ORG’s volunteer Election Watch 2007 team is now online. If you’ve already pledged to devote your day to democracy on May 3, by becoming an accredited election observer in one of the areas where e-voting and e-counting systems are being piloted, then Jason Kitcat will be contacting you soon. If you haven’t, but you’d like to, please pledge now.

We have already succeeded in fielding 3 election monitoring teams. But we’re still looking for people in to help us in the following areas:

• Sheffield - only one more person needed for Pledge success!
• South Bucks (in Pledgebank use “Denham” - the one near Uxbridge, Harefield, Fulmer)
• Bedford
• Breckland (in Pledgebank use “East Dereham”)
• Dover
• Stratford-upon-Avon
• Warwick (in Pledgebank use the one near Leek Wootton, Old Milverton, Leamington)

Doing anything exciting on election day? ORG is looking for volunteers to “devote their day to democracy” and become ORG’s Electoral Commission accredited election observers for the e-voting pilots on Thursday 3 May.

We’ll provide you with full instructions on the kind of things that will be expected of you on the day. We’ll also supply a factsheet of what to look out for in each of the different pilots. We’ll expect you to be travelling around the pilot area during the day, and to turnaround a quick report for us afterwards.

If you live in or around the eleven pilot areas (or are willing to travel there) and you’d like to help out, please let us know. Sign up to our pledge on Pledgebank - we’re using a beta feature that lets you input which of the pilot areas you’re volunteering for. The image on the right shows where volunteers have already signed up.

Please take a look down the list of pilot areas to see if there’s one near you, or one you’d be willing to travel to. The information in brackets will help you sign up to the right area using the Pledgebank system.

The five e-voting pilot areas are:

• Rushmoor (use “Aldershot” in Pledgebank)
• Sheffield
• Shrewsbury & Atcham (use “Shrewsbury” in Pledgebank)
• South Bucks (use “Denham” - the one near Uxbridge, Harefield, Fulmer)
• Swindon (the one near Wroughton, Draycot Foliat, Chisledon)

The six e-counting pilot areas are:

• Bedford
• Breckland (use “East Dereham”)
• Dover
• South Bucks (use “Denham” - the one near Uxbridge, Harefield, Fulmer)
• Stratford-upon-Avon
• Warwick (the one near Leek Wootton, Old Milverton, Leamington)

To read more about e-voting in the UK and across the world, download our briefing pack. If you do volunteer, you’ll be playing a vital role. We need bodies on the ground to inform us about irregularities, machine (and human!) error and even fraudulent activities relating to the trialling of electronic voting mechanisms.

Yesterday, Sir Alistair Graham, chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, called for the 2007 electoral pilots in the UK to be halted, in a speech to the Association of Electoral Administrators conference. Sir Alistair’s committee has recently published a report on the Electoral Commission calling for major reform of both the commission and our electoral system, particularly with regard to fraud.

Sir Alistair is proving to be a strong, independent new voice in the debate concerning our electoral system. His speech today made every point we would like to make and then some. Even though electoral fraud undermines voter confidence, is the DCA’s and the Electoral Commission’s focus on increasing participation causing them to turn a blind eye to fraud? Given existing problems with fraud and unsatisfactory systems for combating fraud, is it appropriate to rush ahead with pilot schemes?

Sir Alistair also argued that the government had been entirely misleading in their use of statistics from Northern Ireland, which has a much stricter electoral regime than the rest of the UK. Sir Alistair argued that in the long term new measures in Northern Ireland had not been damaging to participation as the DCA had argued, and that we should be replicating those measures across the rest of the UK.

The debate continued on BBC Radio 4’s The World at One where Sir Alistair argued that the DCA’s priorities were wrong, saying that “we should be concentrating on safeguarding the integrity of the current voting system rather than experimenting in remote systems which are bound to carry a high risk”.

In an absurd argument, David Monks, Chief Executive and returning officer for Huntingdonshire, stated that if we don’t pilot new voting technologies the fraudsters will have won by preventing changes which benefit society and meet our new modern lifestyles.

Finally, DCA minister Bridget Prentice MP replied to Sir Alistair by saying that he was “just plain wrong”. She didn’t accept any of his arguments whatsoever. She also ignored the implications of this week’s visit by a Council of Europe delegation assessing whether the UK’s electoral system needs to be monitored for fraud, along with many former Soviet republics.

We briefly met the Council of Europe delegation on Monday, giving them copies of the ORG e-voting briefing pack. They seemed to be deeply concerned by the level of worry about fraud in the UK. Indeed, my analysis of 2006 opinion research for the Electoral Commission shows that the public clearly want secret and secure votes ahead of anything else like convenience. Furthermore, political issues were shown to be the main barriers to turnout and not ease of voting.

As Sir Alistair puts it, “deep-seated voter disengagement will not be solved by tinkering with the mechanics of the electoral system”.