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On being modern: New technologies and voting outside the US
Louise Ferguson
UPA Voting and Usability Project
[Forthcoming - September 2003 - UPA Voice]

The argument most frequently advanced in the UK in favour of implementing electronic voting is that it will increase turnout. The under-25s here tend to avoid voting in elections of any type, with local government and European Parliament elections among the worst for turnout (below 40%, sometimes well below) and a continuous downward trend in recent years.

There is also a view in government that electronic voting is modern, and who doesn't want to be modern? The UK's Labour government would like to get most government services online by 2005, and to achieve e-voting "some time after 2006", arguing that we are using digital technologies in many walks of life now.

Over the last four years - excluding 2001 - there have been voting pilots in the UK, involving over 1.5 million voters trialling a range of possible new technologies each year, but limited for the time being to local government elections. These pilots have included voting by phone, text message voting, remote and polling station-based touch screen kiosks, and voting from home by both digital TV and Internet, often using technologies and systems supplied by US companies. 'Old technologies' such as all-postal voting have also been piloted.

Following each election, the UK's Electoral Commission - a public body that reports to Parliament - has issued a report reflecting outcomes and some of the problems encountered.

This year, problems occurred in the small city of St Albans, north of London, where the 'real time' capability of the system suffered failures for parts of polling day. This affected the system designed to ensure that the electronic register kept in each polling station was constantly updated to ensure that a person could not vote via the Internet and also then vote in a polling station. In Sheffield in the north of England, late delivery and incompatibility of polling station computers, together with the under-availability of technicians, meant that some voters had to wait for long periods or were turned away. This failure was blamed on telecoms company BT, one of the partners in the pilot.

After the latest pilots in May 2003, the Electoral Commission concluded that, "we are clearly some way from the prospect of an e-enabled general election" and "we do not seek to put a date on when e-voting will be 'ready for rollout' as there is still insufficient evidence on which to base any such conclusion".

The areas of concern to date in the reports and other literature have tended to be first, security, and second, accessibility. Usability has not to date been mentioned as an e-voting issue, outside of a couple of academic articles.

Professional organisations and others in the UK are becoming increasingly concerned about the trends already occurring. For example, the Association of Electoral Administrators believes that, "the pilot schemes have been too narrow in so much as they are driven by the technology rather than the desire to be entirely flexible and reactive to the needs of voters. There is also a major concern amongst Returning Officers [election officials] that control of the election process is effectively taken over by IT specialists". Which in turn is putting control over the security of the democratic process firmly into the hands of the vendors.

The Electoral Reform Society - an organisation that mainly campaigns on reforming the electoral system in the UK - has recently voted in favour of two motions at its annual general meeting pointing to the failure to address democratic concerns in the race to adopt new voting technologies, and in particular rejecting electronic voting approaches that do not adequately address security issues.

Others have also joined the debate. Dr Ben Fairweather of De Montfort University's Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility, who has written several reports for the UK government on electronic voting, this year came out with strong criticisms of the current approach, stating he had seen serious flaws in several of the systems piloted. Ben is currently working on the area of usability in relation to voting systems. Ian Brown, Director of the UK's Foundation for Information Policy Research, last year invited Rebecca Mercuri to speak in London, and has also voiced concerns about systems currently being piloted.

It has to be said that the UK has not - yet - experienced a voting 'meltdown', a Palm Beach County, a popular treatment by Michael Moore, a PhD like Rebecca Mercuri's, or a Verified Voting campaign by dozens of academics. However, most of the problems experienced on polling day this year centred on getting the technology to work at all, and in one jurisdiction, problems were so severe that the poll was almost abandoned.

Despite the range of criticisms made, it appears that the UK government will now continue with pilots for Internet and telephone voting, perhaps extending them to the forthcoming European elections, due to take place next year.

Elsewhere in Europe, the Irish government has recently bought a US kiosk system to pilot in a limited number of voting districts. The pilot and equipment have come in for criticism from Irish computer scientists Margaret McGaley and J. Paul Gibson. In their report, they point to the work of Rebecca Mercuri on vote verification, as well as expressing other concerns. "The fact that the voting machine has the capability to wipe the contents of the back-up cartridge is worrying. Such features should be isolated from publicly accessible parts of the system. If the system contains such bad design decisions, what else might it contain?"

The Irish government has rejected the report, and confirmed its intention that electronic voting and vote counting systems will be used in all local and European elections in June 2004, arguing that "electronic voting is a desirable modernisation of our electoral procedures," and worryingly dismissing Rebecca Mercuri's work as, "a procedure promoted by an American writer" which is "not suitable for Ireland".

Other governments are also making moves. There are touch screen kiosk systems in use in a few European countries - such as Belgium and the Netherlands - while Brazil is also using new technologies for voting.

Australia appears to be considering electronic voting for overseas voters and citizens based in Antarctica and other remote locations. Ironically, the first Australian 'remote' terminal may be installed at Australia House in the bustling centre of London, to serve the large Australian community here.

The Estonian government has announced plans for e-voting, as has Korea. In the small Andalusian district of Jun in southern Spain, a tiny trial is taking place.

But as yet, the information we have on what is happening where around the world is incomplete. The only people who appear to have a truly international approach are the vendors supplying their equipment to governments around the world, sometimes working in partnership with local corporates.

Publicising what is happening in different jurisdictions, and bringing professionals and concerned individuals together to share experiences, are two steps essential to improving systems and ensuring citizens don't see their democratic rights eroded by the introduction of new technologies to the voting process.

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