By Andy McCue, 25 June 2007 12:40
NEWS
Privacy campaigners have called for any further e-voting trials to be scrapped after uncovering evidence of poor security, inadequate audit trails, equipment failures and an over-dependence on technology suppliers during the May local elections.
The Open Rights Group (ORG) had a team of 25 officially accredited election observers at the e-voting and e-counting pilots and has expressed "deep concern" about the use of the technology in a report of its findings.
Five councils offered internet and telephone voting and six authorities were approved to use electronic counting technology at the May local elections.
Numerous problems were observed with the e-voting technologies by the ORG. In Swindon laptops and live electronic voting registers were unreliable and kept crashing, while in Rushmoor an online ballot paper temporarily included a Labour party logo next to the Conservative party candidate.
The observers also found evidence of weak physical security of the e-voting equipment, such as PCs with open ports and networking devices in openly accessible public areas.
Additional concerns are raised in the report about the alleged vulnerability of the system used to host internet voting for Rushmoor and South Buckinghamshire authorities. According to the report, the system could potentially allow hackers to steal authentication details, monitor how someone had cast their vote or change the contents of the online ballot paper.
The e-counting technology fared no better with observers describing "chaotic scenes" that led to significant delays in the declaration of election results. Problems included scanner malfunctions and software errors.
All of this was compounded by a lack of technical knowledge among the returning officers responsible for ensuring the vote count is accurate and declaring the results, which led to a dangerous over-dependence on the suppliers of the equipment.
The ORG report said the actions of some vendors in trying to fix problems that arose on the day with the e-voting and e-counting equipment left a lack of a reliable audit trail.
The report said: "Returning officers and their deputies were observed to have little or no technical knowledge, leaving them unable to judge the quality of the technologies supplied. They were unable to monitor technical issues - and hence hold their suppliers to account."
The ORG is now calling for a halt in any further use of e-voting and e-counting technology until it is proven to be more robust, reliable and transparent.
Jason Kitcat, ORG's e-voting co-ordinator, said in the report: "We were surprised by the scale of the problems our team observed on polling day. Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to verify the accuracy of the elections we monitored."
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1. Graham Coles
This is an absolute farce.
The Americans have already proven how utterly unreliable e-voting is in their previous election.
Now it seems the labour government wants another go at screwing up our electoral system, having been found guilty of vote tampering after forcing some councils to go for less secure postal voting a while back.
This is typical of govenment interference at its very worse. We already have a time proven, reliable and secure voting system with good safeguards that is so simple it could be explained to a class of ten year olds.
Now the government wants to replace it with insecure, bug-ridden, unreliable, proprietory electronic systems where vote tampering can be better hidden, your vote is no longer secret and probably doesn't even go where you direct it.
Worse still, you couldn't even attempt to describe the alleged system security to any audience not equipped with a degree in computer science and pure maths!
The Americans have had all of these problems, voting machines registering more votes than voters, negative vote counts etc. yet still we have a government that seems to be pushing ahead with this.
Why in God's name do we need this. It is a waste of time, a waste of money and is just destroying any credibility in the electoral system. I can only think of one reason why any government would want this at this stage, and that would be to fix the election result (which is about all you can actually achieve with e-voting).
Perhaps we should be asking if any of the companies submitting voting machines have made any donations to the labour party recently.
There is an age old axiom, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. This government seems to be trying to replace this with 'if it ain't broke, and it works well, waste a lot of money replacing it with something half as good that keeps breaking.'