Government urged to halt internet voting trials

By Simon Aughton

Posted on 2 Aug 2007 at 11:35

The Electoral Commission has urged the UK Government to halt trials of telephone and internet voting. The organisation responsible for monitoring elections across the country believes that recent pilot tests in local elections have shown that the electoral system needs to be modernised and made more secure before e-voting is re-introduced.

Various forms of internet and telephone voting and electronic voting in polling stations were tested in Rushmoor, Sheffield, Shrewsbury and Atcham, South Bucks and Swindon. The Commission says that these pilots raised concerns about low public confidence in the security of such methods and about accessibility.

Electronic counting took place in five councils, but problems with the technology in Breckland, Stratford-on Avon and Warwick resulted in the electronic count being abandoned in favour of a traditional manual count.

Counting in the other pilot areas was completed although it was slower than expected and difficulties were reported in Bedford and South Bucks, the Commission reports, noting that the problems were mainly a result of limited testing and insufficient planning prior to the election.

"We have learnt a good deal from pilots over the past few years," says Peter Wardle, Electoral Commission chief executive. "But we do not see any merit in continuing with small-scale, piecemeal piloting where similar innovations are explored each year without sufficient planning and implementation time, and in the absence of any clear direction, or likelihood of new insights."

The Commission recommends that no more e-voting is carried out until there is a system of individual voter registration to replace the current household registration process.

"We welcome the recent government green paper on constitutional reform; and we believe this needs to be supported by a clear plan for modernising elections," Wardle claims. "We continue to believe that the security of our electoral process needs to be strengthened through a system of individual registration."

The Commission's findings were welcomed by the Open Rights Group (ORG), which opposed the recent e-voting trials.

Executive director Becky Hogge claims that the Commission's report echoes the conclusions of ORG's own monitoring teams.

"We're pleased that the Commission has recognised the desperate need for public debate about the role technology might play in our electoral system," she says. However she is concerned that the report does not address "fundamental" issues highlighted in ORG's e-voting briefing pack, namely that e-voting "is an incredibly complex and very expensive technology that introduces new risks, doubts, and opportunities for fraud and failure".

Election minister Michael Wills says the Ministry of Justice will study the report, but defended the integrity of the pilots.

"We are pleased that the evaluations point to a high level of system security and user confidence in e-voting systems tested and that the security and integrity of the polls was not compromised," he says, despite the Commission report explicitly stating that security needs to be strengthened.