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Voting over the internet has its attractions,

The free e-Democracy project was stopped when the author found out that having Free Software or not for electronic election is not the issue.

He found out he better fight bad e-Voting by design than to try to fix a solution searching for a problem. Now he started a resolution promoting e-Voting with VVAT (Voter Verified Audit Trail).

How do you deal with two election run the same day (European + xxx)?

Is the source code + hardware specification of the system available to the general public?

How does the voter know his vote has been counted... trust an expert?

Is it possible to do recount in the Nederlands? What do you recount then?

Is there a paper version of the vote printed (paper audit trail) that is VoterVerifiable?

Do not hesitate to contact me (the web master of PourEVA) with information about e-voting in your european country.

Are you going to tell me that some ivory-tower egg head (Homer Simpson says it best) hasn't come up with a highly reliable computerized voting architecture based around public/private keys, solutions to the Byzantine Generals Problem, and other distributed algorithms?

Kinda. Not public/private keys (voting is anonymous) but... Voter Verified Electronic Election is Ivory Tower Egghead stuff that you might like.

As for the turnout, this excerpt from the Free E-Democracy Project explains it best:

Increased Turnout

Turnout (the number of people who vote in an election) has been steadily decreasing across most of the Western world. People are living increasingly busy lives with growing work and family commitments. Having to go to an old school or church hall to vote is difficult to fit into the day and seems anachronistic in this modern day. The younger generations, who vote even less than the rest, are probably turned off by the idea of voting with a stubby pencil and piece of paper when their lives revolve around the digital world of mobiles and consoles. If we make voting easier and more modern a greater number of people are likely to vote.

Rebuttal:

While some people do find it difficult to vote the traditional way, most people don't choose to not vote because of the hassle or its dated image. Surveys generally indicate that they feel their votes don't count, all the options are the same or they simply don't feel they know enough to make an educated choice. Jeremy Paxman has shown that turnout is significantly lower in areas where polling stations are within walking distance, when it's a trek people actually make the effort - convenience isn't the problem in the vast majority of cases.

Voting is important but by focussing on increasing turnout we miss the broader point that to re-invigorate participation in democracy we need to fundamentally reform our constitutional institutions and processes, not fiddle with the method of voting. With a strong representative democracy turnout will naturally rise. Give voters some credit, they aren't lazy couch potatoes who will only vote if it consists of pressing the red button on the TV remote.

In short, most likely electronic voting will not have much influence on the turnout. And considering the risks of electronic voting as opposed to 'classic' voting, why bother? Pencil-On-Paper voting works, and it works well. And, most importantly, it guarantees more security than what can possibly provided by an electronic system. See the rest of that article at the link above, it's a good read.

We shouldn't do everything with computers just because it's possible. I, for one, would prefer to avoid any type of electronic election whenever something is at stake.

See this site for GNU.FREE and why we decided not to continue developing Free Software e-voting...

"The final straw was a book by Greg Palast, "The best democracy money can buy", which in one chapter explained how the Republicans had stolen tens of thousands of votes in Florida. The details are arduous, but in essence a sub-contractor used to clean the electoral roll was the cover for the illegitimate removal of a large number of Democrat voters. This was shocking enough, but the fact the Palast had to come all the way to the UK to get the story published in the independently funded BBC and Guardian newspaper truly drove me crazy."

= 9J =

"The final straw was a book by Greg Palast, "The best democracy money can buy", which in one chapter explained how the Republicans had stolen tens of thousands of votes in Florida. The details are arduous, but in essence a sub-contractor used to clean the electoral roll was the cover for the illegitimate removal of a large number of Democrat voters. This was shocking enough, but the fact the Palast had to come all the way to the UK to get the story published in the independently funded BBC and Guardian newspaper truly drove me crazy."

= 9J =

A group of computer scientist professors is creating . This is not the same as GNU's Free Software Internet Voting. Given the Diebold fiasco there's a greater need for these than for the software to discuss potential candidates.

Even better, if Verisign running your elections worries you, why not see if you can help the project. With a secure, trusted and freely available alternative, Verisign will find it more difficult to convince audit committees that their software is the best option.

If you're suggesting that the voter doesn't get a printed receipt, but instead the machine prints out their voting slip, they check it, and post it into a black box, then what's been won over manual voting? (i.e. bits of paper and pencils - thankfully still the way things are done in the UK, but our government is keen on doing the e-voting thing too...)

Like others, I've come to the conclusion that e-voting is a fundamentally less safe practice than manual voting.

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This looks to me like another country trying to gain international attention by adopting a 'sign of modernity'. In other words those making the decision to adopt this have no idea of the electoral implications but want to be seen to be 'with it' and in touch with modern technology.

Electronic voting is extremely expensive, provides opportunities for massive fraud on scales never before seen and makes the voting system opaque to the voters, observers and even candidates. No country, especially not a developing one, can in good faith spend vast somes of money on questionable proprietary technology from mainly dodgy suppliers (guilty of fraud, bribery etc) when there are mouths to feed, hospitals to build and schools to fund.

I won't rehearse all the arguments, but check out our Learn section for more, or listen to me slug it out with the CEO of VoteHere at the Oxford debate recording here.

This looks to me like another country trying to gain international attention by adopting a 'sign of modernity'. In other words those making the decision to adopt this have no idea of the electoral implications but want to be seen to be 'with it' and in touch with modern technology.

Electronic voting is extremely expensive, provides opportunities for massive fraud on scales never before seen and makes the voting system opaque to the voters, observers and even candidates. No country, especially not a developing one, can in good faith spend vast somes of money on questionable proprietary technology from mainly dodgy suppliers (guilty of fraud, bribery etc) when there are mouths to feed, hospitals to build and schools to fund.

I won't rehearse all the arguments, but check out our Learn section for more, or listen to me slug it out with the CEO of VoteHere at the Oxford debate recording here.

Time to start a viable open-source voting-machine project. These guys started something promising, but it looks like development has ceased. Anybody know of a decent, active open-source electronic voting system?

-j

MY good friend Jason Kitcat worked on a e-election project for his thesis and did a hell of a lot of research on this. I was stunned after talking to him recently that he too has become diillusioned with e-voting as it stands now. His main concerns were the ease with which ballots could be tampered with, especially where there is the political will... See here for more info: free-proect.org.

"If they're so worried the voting software is closed source, why not start an open source project?"

Because they don't need to. It already exists -- the need now is for people to make sure that the good systems get used.

It's no point writing the best software if people running the elections go out and buy a piece-of-shit proprietry system just because they know the people selling it, and it has a cool brochure.

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Who wants to start an open source project to replace this failed service.

GNU.Free ?

I submitted this before the polls opened. It was rejected:


Today, many Americans will vote using computerized balloting systems for the first time. Voters from the Slashdot community should take notes and report back here about their experiences. This article in Salon talks about the problems we've seen before, and will probably see again today. Jason Kitcat, founder of Gnu.FREE, an open-source electronic voting system, says, "I've come to the realization that electronic voting of any type...is a terrible, terrible idea."

That project is licensed with the GPL, but is not endorsed by GNU.

GNU has its own project GNU.FREE.

GNU.FREE definitely looks more mature than that 'Samba', take a look at it.

Fh

I would suggest looking through the GNU.Free project for more information.

Jason Kitcat, the maintainer of the project, spoke here in Cambridge (England) a couple months ago. Very informative talk, explaining the merits and pitfalls of electronic voting.

The site contains numerous articles detailing most aspects of e-democracy in action. Most of the information from Jason's talk is available of the GNU.Free site.

"The problem with this idea is that its completely impossible to implement. There are no reliable ways of making sure that one person=one vote, no way of guaranteeing even participation geographically, economically, or any other way"

Need I direct you to the Free democracy project?

The state-of-the-art in electronic voting is a whole lot more advanced than you might think by looking at government's "send your PIN in a text message" projects!

Provide a secure and private system

Create scalable and reliable software

Offer a non-commercial, non-partisan voting alternative

Use the GPL to create an open system that Internet users will trust

Release a system that can be used to support the growth of effective democracy anywhere in the world Additionally, in support of our wider development community, the project aims to:-

• Advocate the free software paradigm
• Evangelise the use of technology to strengthen democracy within a holistic understanding of the current malaise i.e. Internet voting alone isn't going to solve turnout problems

From their homepage:
Welcome to the FREE e-democracy project's website. We are a project dedicated to creating the GNU.FREE Internet Voting system and also advocating Free Software in e-democracy. To understand why we think it's important for e-democracy software to be Free Software which is non-partisan and non-commercial in origin see our Writings Section. GNU.FREE software is written in Java and is available from the Download Section. There is more information in the Users' Section and considerable technical detail in the Developers' Section. The GNU.FREE software suite is an official package of the Free Software Foundation's GNU project and is supported by FreeDevelopers.net and OpenElection.org. More affiliates, related sites and people are available from the Connections Section.

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.

We covered this back in Febuary: Jason Kitcat applied under the Freedom of Information Act for more details. The government's e-envoy has also funded a research project into providing Free Software support for their PKI. If you've got some expertise, I'm sure the project leaders would appreciate your assistance.

I don't actually think that the IE exclusion is the most damaging part of this story. The tacit support by the government for a handful of commercial authentication services (at least one of which, Chambersign, appears to involve private key escrow) looks to be more pernicious.

d.

Kitcat's FOIA report
Original report
Follow-up, including mention of the Open Source project, with details of how you can help.