The Dutch council of ministers decided yesterday to refrain from using electronic voting machines for good.
This dates mainly back to the activities from the “We don’t trust voting computers group” by Rop Gongrijp who demonstrated on Dutch TV live how one change the EPROM of the Nedap voting machine and make it play chess.
Currently we are waiting for the ruling from the German constitutional court on the use of similar models of the Nedap EVMs in Germany.
I’m currently in London, attending the Local E-Democracy Symposium (http://www.empowerment-symposium.com) . There I came across an interesting project which tries to do a world-wide e-vote on the opinion of the world’s population on United Nations resolutions. The most recent one deals with the Kosovo becoming an own state, …
From 3rd to 4th of April the Overseas Voter Foundation will host its second annual summit to discuss
I’ve been invited to the summit in Munich, Germany to participate in a debate pro & con of Internet voting for citizens abroad. For sure this will be a perfect opportunity to discuss the results of the primaries and their experiments with internetvoting.
Besides me also Melanie Volkamer from the University of Passau will participate – any others are welcome to join in!
And a final post for today. Jordi Barrat gave me note about a job offering for a PhD position on E-Voting. He is constitutional law professor at the University of Alicante. You don’t need to be proficient in Spanish although it would definitely help a lot đ
Read more here:
Framework: The position is funded by the Spanish government within the
following research project: SEJ2007-64886 (Citizens, new technologies and decision process: the e-voting challenges).
The main goal of the project consist in assessing the challenges of e-voting systems with an approach based on social sciences, including law, political science and philosophy. Its members belong to different Spanish Universities: the University of Barcelona, the Complutense University of Madrid and the Rovira i Virgili University.
Topic: Electronic Voting. It includes, but it is not limited, the following topics:
Years: 2008 / 2011 (4 years)
Location: Depending on the scientific profile of the candidate.
He/She will work together with one of our current
members who belong to different Universities: Law (Alacant,
Complutense or Rovira i Virgili), Political Sciencie and Philosphy
(Barcelona).
Call for candidatures: expected January 2008.
People interested should send ASAP a cv and a short research outline to jordi.barrat@ua.es
I had the chance to review an earlier version of the manuscript – it gives a good introduction on the tough job on how to observe and monitor implementations of technology in the electoral process. This overview can serve as a good starting point for looking into the interdisciplinary issues involved and gives an overview on the international legal instruments that can help doing so.
From the guide’s abstract:
“This Guide will serve as a practical guide for nonpartisan monitors and political competitors. It will outline the various applications of electronic technologies in the election process, the critical points where transparency and access are needed to verify the integrity of the technologies, and common techniques for verifying their integrity.
The specific objective of the Guide is to increase the understanding of civil society and political party leaders regarding: (a) what access and transparency measures to demand to establish safeguards concerning electronic electoral technologies; and (b) what skills their organizations will need to develop to verify the integrity of electronic electoral technologies.”
Please contact Laura Grace (lgrace@ndi.org) from NDI for obtaining a copy.
Following the successful VOTE-ID conference in Bochum last year, the conference chairs, Ammar Alkassar and Melanie Volkamer managed to accomplish very interesting post proceedings to appear the in the prestigious LNCS series from Springer publications.
The following articles are included:
The Development of Remote E-Voting Around the World: A Review of Roads and Directions
Robert Krimmer, Stefan Triessnig und Melanie Volkamer
For more information on how to obtain see:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/l3858136u758/
In the past months we enhanced our e-voting database both visually and functionality wise.
First of all we updated it to our CI and second also added the functionality to make accounts.
If you wish changes and addendums to the database can now be attributed to your account so
everybody can who that smart-ass is to have added all the information on - maybe the US e-elections (especially any elections on the Internet)?
We really need your support to add here more information so if you can spare some time and help us make this database more complete, do so! check it out at db.e-voting.cc/US
Now as the primaries heat up, I would like to point you to a project by my colleague Arno Scharl from the Modul University here in Vienna, Austria. It’s the a follow up to the Election Monitor he did for the 2004 presidential elections.
He uses semantic web technology to analyze both the attention and sentiments given to candidates in online media (news, blogs, etc.) worldwide – it can also be segmented by countries (US, CA, UK, AU/NZ) as well as different types of media (news, political blogs).
For example you can compare the attention given to Clinton in comparison to Obama. While the attention for the latter stays the same over the past, Clinton still getting the most attention is loosing attraction for the media. Unfortunately we have to wait for the next update (due tomorrow) to include the results of the first primaries in this analysis. It gives quite a good insight, so be sure to check it out.
Did you ever ask yourself how many voters participated in the 2000
ICANN at large election?
Over the past 1 year I worked together with Stefan Triessnig and Daniel Botz on putting a WIKI-style database online, where everybody can document e-voting uses, trials, etc.
We have come with more than 228 E-Voting uses in our database. Currently it’s mainly European-focused, so we need the help of the US-community to include your continent’s experience in e-voting as well.
You can use the website in many ways. If you want information on a country?s
experiences just add the top level domain to the URL so i.e. http://db.e-voting.cc/DE for Germany.
If you want to stay up to date, you can subscribe to the RSS-Feed at http://db.e-voting.cc/feed/site-changes.xml
At the VOTE-ID-2007 conference I had a paper with the first analysis of the db’s data. you can download it here.
I’m happy to receive feedback on this initiative at r.krimmer@e-voting.cc