The CIA, which has been monitoring foreign countries’ use of electronic voting systems, has reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela, Macedonia and Ukraine and a raft of concerns about the machines’ vulnerability to tampering.
The Edinburgh Council by-election due to be held early next month is to adopt the same electronic voting system as was used for the last national election in May 2007, sparking fears that history will be unnecessarily repeated.
Source: The Edinburgh Journal
Parlimentry written question:
Eleanor Laing (Shadow Minister, Justice; Epping Forest, Conservative)
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice whether there are any plans to introduce e-voting mechanisms before the local and European elections in 2009.
Michael Wills (Minister of State, Ministry of Justice; North Swindon, Labour)
No. The Government do not plan to introduce e-voting for the 2009 European or local elections.
The way forward more generally on e-voting will be informed by the valuable experience gained from earlier pilots, analysis of the responses to the election day consultation, and further development work including the possible further testing of e-voting solutions in non-statutory elections.
Source: TheyWorkForYou.com
Eleanor Laing
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice whether there are any plans for further e-voting pilots in the next 12 months.
Michael Wills (Minister of State, Ministry of Justice; North Swindon, Labour)
The Government have no plans for further e-voting pilots in statutory elections at this stage.
Source: TheyWorkForYou.com
ArsTechnica reports:
A study conducted by a researcher in France has uncovered that polling locations which use electronic voting machines exhibit a higher number of discrepancies than those using conventional paper ballots.
Via The Register
“We could do a sample manual recount, but if it turned up a problem, we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, which would be the quickest way to collapse voter confidence in the result,” Bennet told us.
This is an anathema to campaigners like Mercuri. “The law should always include some percentage of manual audit and there always must be a way that a problem with the check should trigger an investigation, possibly resulting in the discarding of the electronic totals.”
And she is not the only one who thinks the electronic count should be audited. Becky Hogge, executive director of the Open Rights Group, says that ORG is campaigning for the law to be changed to make a manual recount of a statistically significant sample to be mandatory in all electronically counted elections.
via The Register
The amount of criticism lobbed onto to e-voting machine makers for sub-par security prompted Wagner to liken them to Microsoft before it made security a major push. “Voting system vendors are where Microsoft was 10 years ago,” he said.
(Via Techdirt.)
…
However, a New Jersey state judge has now ruled that it’s perfectly reasonable for independent inspectors to review the machines.
The bill for last year’s Scottish elections is more than double the previous one, with the cost reaching almost £40m. SNP MSP Keith Brown said that in total the 2007 Holyrood and local government elections had cost £39.26m.
Mr Brown said almost £9m of the money spent on the 2007 polls had gone to DRS, the company which provided the electronic counting machines. He said the cost of elections in 2003 had been £17.15m.
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