Comment: TV turns the spotlight on e-voting flaws

As you may have heard, controversy enveloped the conclusion of ITV's recent Popstars: The Rivals. Fans of hot favourite Javine contacted radio stations and newspapers to complain that, when they tried to vote for her by telephone, they heard a confirmatory message saying, "Thanks for your vote for Sarah." Good news for Sarah, of course, but not so great for Javine.

It's easy to dismiss the dashed hopes of the desperate-to-be-famous, but maybe we should be more concerned. After all, the government's July 2002 consultation paper on electronic voting, In the service of democracy, explicitly referred to "interactive TV shows such as Big Brother or Pop Idol" as an appropriate model for e-democracy.

Of course a real, govern-the-nation election would be subject to far greater checks and balances than those used for Popstars. It would be beyond reproach, surely?

Well, maybe not. Back in May I wrote about the distressing way in which electronic voting is being promoted in the UK. The government's report on trials carried out in the spring 2002 local elections, The Implementation of Electronic Voting in the UK, was a Jekyll and Hyde affair. The cheery executive summary - destined to be better read than, say, the appendices - said public confidence was the main issue. This jarred somewhat with the pages at the back, where academics noted the hugely increased dangers of ballot rigging.

There has been further debate stimulated by a Cabinet Office consultation process that drew to a close last month. The cogitative wheels of government are still grinding away in the aftermath of that exercise, and we can look forward to a response to the public feedback at some ill-defined point in the future.

Barely a week after the consultation closed, however, the government coughed up a document, e-Voting Technical Security Requirements, setting out terms for its second wave of experiments in e-voting, to be carried out in the May 2003 local elections.

This document was based on a study issued at the end of July this year by CESG (Communications-Electronics Security Group - part of GCHQ). As Cambridge University professor and security pundit Ross Anderson has noted, CESG suffers from a Jekyll and Hyde problem of its own. On the one hand, it needs to inflate digital threats, to encourage the public and industry to install adequate security. On the other, it needs to play down the dangers to build faith in e-government. It appears to have been wearing the latter of its two hats when it compiled its e-voting report

Call me a Luddite, but I side with US e-democracy expert Rebecca Mercuri, who called the CESG document "erroneous". In a formal submission to the consultation process, she wrote, "It is not presently (nor in the foreseeable future) possible to construct a secure, Internet-based system for remote electronic voting".

The CESG report notes that "the current UK voting system is not perfect [and] it is probably impossible to make any system perfect... the level of risk that is acceptable to the UK electoral system must be determined."

Mercuri is not impressed. "[To] use this as an excuse to impose a horribly imperfect and flawed process on the voting public is sorely misguided. Although the intentions were admirable, the fact remains that the infrastructure necessary for the success of remote electronic voting does not exist. I hope that these strong words will motivate concerns sufficient to cease the introduction of e-voting into the UK."

Nice try, but I doubt harsh words will dent the government's enthusiasm. The CESG report suggests using scratch-cards to deliver pre-encrypted voting codes to users, and I think the government is more likely to be inspired by this submission. Perhaps it will offer a free National Lottery entry to anyone that bothers to vote.

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