WRITTEN ON June 20th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Political engagement

The splendidly vibrant and energetic Open Rights Group (on the Board of which which I have the pleasure of serving) releases its report today into the 3 May e-voting and e-counting pilots. There’s coverage on Channel 4, The Guardian and the Daily Mail

Computer experts have raised “serious concerns” over the use of electronic voting technology, a report released reveals.

The Open Rights Group said it is opposed to the introduction of e-voting and e-counting after it oversaw last month’s local elections.

It added that voting systems tested on May 3 – including voting by phone and the electronic counting of ballot papers – had led to a large numbers of spoilt votes in the Scottish Parliament elections and confusion at counts for English local authorities.

ORG does not sit around. They registered themselves as official election observers (the first time it was possile to do this in the UK) and went and observed. Except, as they rightly observe, you cannot observe what’s going on inside a black box to which you have no access, especially if you can see they’re not working but sweaty technicians are shoving USB sticks in them.

When a group of such effective and expert computer users say computers should not be used for voting, people who understand less about computers should listen carefully. And ORG had Richard Clayton acting as an election observer, who understands more about computing than pretty much everyone else on the planet as far as I can tell.

The triallist coucils seem to endorse the ORG view. Breckland DC says

“Although we were pleased to take part in the electronic trial, what we found was that there were a number of difficulties which would have to be ironed out before we would use it in another election.”

Funny thing with the Daily Mail pic:

Why in this otherwise fuzzy pic do the letters Blair stand out so clearly, as if inked in after? He wasnt even involved in the election on May 3rd. Have they used a different Blair in an attempt to taint by association?

Over at the blog of dooooooooom Ian Brown has a far better pic.