UK Electoral Commission: no e-voting in 2004

The Electoral Commission has today announced that there will not be any e-voting pilots in 2004:

"We are clear that there is much still to be learnt about electronic voting."

"3.20 The Commission is not able to recommend that any region is suitable to undertake an e-enabled pilot scheme, as we believe that no region is ready for such innovation at this stage in the development of the electoral modernisation programme."

What is of concern is that the Commission is still promoting the idea of remote Internet voting - in future years: this is a channel largely rejected by the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) in its Voting Systems Standards report. I quote:

"Internet voting: A recent report conducted by the Internet Policy Institute and sponsored by the National Science Foundation in cooperation with the University of Maryland stated: 'Remote Internet voting systems pose a significant risk to the integrity of the voting process and should not be fielded for use in public elections until substantial technical and social science issues hve been addressed. The security risk associated with these systems are both numerous and pervasive and, in many cases, cannot be resolved using even today's most sophisticated technology'.

"The findings of this and other studies on Internet voting have led the FEC and NASED to conclude that controls cannot be developed at the present time to make remote Internet voting sufficiently risk-resistent to be confidently used by election officials and the voting public."

Note that the objections are not purely on technical grounds, but based also on the social and behavioural aspects of voting, such as the power given to householders over family votes. It has to be said that we understand little about this field, and to date governments have failed to fund research into the social aspects of voting (excepting the recently launched US multi-disciplinary research project led by Peter Francia at the University of Maryland in the US).

An article concerning the disappearance of the secret ballot, written by John Morrison and appearing in the December issue of Prospect (subscription required), highlights this issue: "But unless the Commission abandons focus groups and opinion polling for real empirical research on how voters behave, the evidence will never be found".

Quite.


UK Electoral Commission reports:
The Electoral Commission: Response to the Government consultation paper on Pilots in 2004

Electoral Commission: Electoral pilots at the June 2004 elections