e-voting – Page 3 – davelevy.info

Voting by Mobile Phone

Polly Toynbee in the Guardian today bemoans the low turn out and the perceived ‘rotten borough’ nature of Britain’s parliamentary democracy. Among her arguments she suggests voting should be made easier by allowing people to use their mobile phones.

I have commented; because identifying oneself to government, counting elections and guaranteeing the secrecy of the ballot are the last things we should hand over to proprietary, closed software. Digital activists have come to the conclusion that even counting election results by scanned paper ballots is undesirable and where it is done in this country, a sample based manual verification is undertaken. I presented the argument that the regulator’s code must be open to the @labourdigital Top of the Manifestos event. …

I.T. & e-referenda

One of the proposals at the Top of the Manifestos event was loads of e-referenda. (That’s an interesting sentence, the plurals of manifesto and referendum are both unusual.) So apart from the IT security issues, one has to ask, where’s the debate and where’s the evaluation of evidence. Obviously the debate would once have happened in a broadcast world where the cost of a seat at the table was immense and thus the voices of the wealthy are amplified; and this applies to the newspapers as well as the 24 hour news channels such as Sky. The relevance of the print is diminishing, but the TV not so much. Social media platforms are developing new collaboration and voting mechanisms, often specifically to solve issues of governance. But it’s not yet ready. There is little argument that blogging software has empowered many people to express their views which has in some, but not all cases, drawn them into the policy development and analysis. …

Pragmatic Radicalism’s Top of the Policies on the Digital Revolution

As promised I popped over Pragmatic Radicalism’s the Top of the Manifestos event run by @LabourDigital. I proposed that “the regulator’s code must be open” and this can be seen at their updated event page. I presented a pitch entitled, “The regulators code must be open” but sixty seconds isn’t long. It didn’t win, or even make the final cut! …

Ballot Secrecy in Britain

Robin Wilton wrote in his blog about the fact that an elector’s polling number is written on the ballot paper’s counter-foil. He argues that this means that a polling number’s and hence voter’s vote can be determined. …