UK 2005 Securing the Vote report and 2007 e-voting trials

Nothing remains of the May 2005 Securing the Vote report on the UK Electoral Commission site.  There used to be a page Securing the vote – detailed proposals for electoral change announced but it is now gone.

The only location where a copy could be found was in a document repository from The Guardian newspaper: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Politics/documents/2005/05/20/eleccommission.pdf

The UK did extensive reporting on the 2007 pilots, the website was http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/elections/pilots/May2007 but it is no longer online. There is a copy in the Internet Archive.

Although there is no longer an organising page on the Electoral Commission page, some of the reports from 2007 are still available from them, as well as being copied in the Internet Archive.

There are two considerations to highlight from the UK Electronic Voting Summary:

  • New voting methods should be rolled out only once their security and reliability have been fully tested and proven and they can command wide public confidence.
  • The necessary costs for secure and reliable systems must be able to be reasonably met by the public purse.

I will highlight only one item from the Technical Assessments of the e-voting Pilots, item 3.4.4 from Assessment of the pilot process – Quality management:

While there were variations between the different pilots, in all cases the quality and testing arrangements appeared to be inadequate. It is difficult to tell whether this was purely because of lack of time, or whether some of the suppliers were not used to implementing effective quality processes. Significant quality management failings include:
a. Lack of detailed design documentation;
b. Lack of evidence of design or code reviews or other mechanisms for ensuring that the solutions operate correctly and do not include deliberate or accidental security flaws;
c. Lack of evidence of effective configuration management.

This kind of haphazard voting software development has been shockingly common, e.g. for US voting machines as well.

Note: The preceding is extracted from previous blog post Province of Ontario Internet voting.

UPDATE 2019-07-08: Just to bring all the pieces of the puzzle together, I will also point to a 2008 news release – Official report on internet voting pilot at Rushmoor elections published.

Other key findings in the report are that:

  • there was no impact on turnout, which actually decreased very slightly from 36 percent in 2006 to 35.2 per cent at these elections;
  • most internet voters (70 per cent) said they would have voted anyway;
  • …