E-voting: growing concerns
Professor David Dill (Stanford University) is running a campaign of opposition to unaudited electronic voting. Many US scientists have already endorsed his statement on electronic voting, including Barbera Simons (Co-chair, U.S. Public Policy Committee of ACM and Former ACM President), veteran campaigner Rebecca Mercuri (Bryn Mawr College), Ronald Rivest (MIT), Babara Liskov (MIT), Michael Fischer (Yale), Leslie Lamport (Microsoft), David Touretzky (Carnegie Mellon), Susan Landau (Sun), Lori Clarke (Massachusetts) and David Dobkin (Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Princeton).

Following a recent correspondence concerning possible 'across-the-pond' collaboration on this issue, David Dill has now passed on information from another campaigner he's heard from, this time in Europe. Emanuele Lombardi in Italy has set up http://www.electronic-vote.org. He's concerned about the dangers of the unaudited systems being proposed: "Here [in Italy] there is no discussion at all about the topic. Most of the Italians accept everything new just because it's new and no one seems to have any doubts about the electronic vote."

The UK's Computer Weekly in this week's edition (30 January) once again reported that the UK government plans to press ahead with e-voting plans at the May local elections. Eighteen councils are to trial new systems across all wards, in the largest test to date. You can find out more about current plans on the UK government's website devoted to the issue.

Is it about time we did something more in the UK to open up the debate on e-voting? To misquote a certain nursery rhyme, when things are good, they can be very very good, but when they are bad they are pretty horrid, this being just as true of e-voting as of any other sphere of life. The Foundation for Information Policy Research, in the capable hands of Ian Brown at my alma mater, UCL, hosted a seminar given by Rebecca Mercuri in London at the end of last year on this matter. Perhaps the next steps now need to be taken to generate wider public discussion...

One thing that never ceases to surprise is that whenever the UK government buys anything electronic, it always believes everything the system seller promises.