Call for e-voting to be scrapped amid security fears

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."