Friday

Friday 2/05/2003

Even in London, we've heard that elections are going on in the world outside the M25. A lot of them have some form of electronic voting option too, and this is seen as one of the major experiments leading up to full blown e-voting at a post 2006 general election.

As far as I know, no protocol for electronic voting has been published in the UK. Are these things open source? "We've seen the source", says one council, neatly sidestepping the issue. How do you do recounts? How extensive is the authentication of the results? Has anyone considered running two systems from separate companies in parallel, for redundancy and verification? Aircraft do it, and how much more important is democracy?

I have previously asked these and other questions of the Cabinet Office, but never got anywhere. Time for the Electoral Reform Society, I guess. Although with a government whose taste for the truth is so dissipated it gives extensive funding to institutes for fundamentalist Christian propaganda -- and lets them operate as state schools -- the struggle to get any sense may have to go on for some time.

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