After the US Presidential election, which has occurred following some dreadful weather that side of the Atlantic, the hoary topic of doing something techie to make voting and counting easier has arisen again. The good old MIT Technology Review has published a piece by David Talbot entitled “Why You Can’t Vote Online – Fundamental security problems aren’t solved, computing experts warn“, where the comments make equally good reading as the article itself. Closely following this was the news in The Register that given the weather the State of New Jersey’s attempt to make life better by instituting a ‘vote by email’ route had collapsed when inboxes filled, and votes were directed to personal email accounts.
In the UK we are going to the polls shortly to elect Police & Crime Commissioners and although the weather will be better, we hope, than the north-eastern coast of the USA, getting some people to the polling station will be very hard. Even if a workable technical solution is produced we still have the lack of quality broadband throughout the UK to deliver it over. Estonia, one of the places where e-voting appears to work has both broadband and identity cards, so two of the difficulties are surmounted already. In the UK and the USA confirming ones identity can be a regular difficulty as has been already stated on this blog.
The trouble with both the UK and the USA is that we have hoary old ‘democratic’ systems that were developed when populations were smaller and less people had representation. There are a lot of wrinkles to be ironed out in the system, before we even bother with making it ‘easier’. One comment on the MIT article effectively states that the person concerned wouldn’t spend the price of a stamp on voting, wouldn’t go to a polling station, but might consider email – does anyone like that deserve a vote or isn’t it seen to be making enough of a difference?
Posted by greatemancipator 
The Great E-mancipator 