Tag: e-voting

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;
  • …

Updates on Internet voting worldwide

Many things are happening.  Too many things for me to write separate blog posts.  Here’s the situation as of March 8, 2017:

Canada

  • Canadian Parliamentary Special Committee on Electoral Reform recommended against national Internet voting – see December 1, 2016 blog post ERRE Electoral Reform Committee Recommends Against Online Voting
  • Canada’s Minister of Democratic Institutions was directed in her Mandate Letter to defend the Canadian electoral process against cyberthreats – see January 23, 2017 blog post defend Canadian electoral process from cyber threats
  • New Brunswick legislature Commission on Electoral Reform recommended against Internet voting – see March 23, 2017 blog post New Brunswick Internet voting and page 21 of Commission report A pathway to an inclusive democracy
  • Vancouver Independent Election Task Force recommended to city council that Vancouver conduct an online voting pilot, including asking the province to establish an independent technical committee – see slide 17 “Conduct an online voting pilot” of the Task Force presentation to council and pages 27-28 of the Task Force final report
  • Many Ontario municipalities have approved Internet voting for the 2018 municipal elections (far more than this blog can track; it will probably end up being about 200 municipalities)

Everywhere Else