A secure democratic Net is a fundamental right

We will likely have federal elections june the 13th for a reason that is quite hard to explain - even Belgians don't understand too much about it :)

The interesting thing is that a great number of great cities and smaller voting districts will organize it by computer.

What is interesting to know is that

* the hardware is from the nineties

* the software is old legacy code that has to be rewritten each time - in case we will know how the voting districts will be organised because there is still some discussion about that ....

* the parliamentary or democratic control on the way these electronic elections work is not really professional (if you click on the button evoting you will read more about evoting in Belgium).There are only a few supervisors dispatched from the parliament for the whole of the disctricts where electronic elections are held.

* the machines are installed in public places overnight, it is not clear if all those places are protected during that time

* the maintenance and the incident handling is done by a private firm and the technical supervision before, during and after the installation and is minimal, the supervisors in the voting places have not really a technical formation about how to supervise such an installation

* the last time there were a few incidents but the parliamentary reports about the electoral process are written by consensus and hardly debated in the parliament or the press. It is not a cover up but you have to read between the lines and know what it exactly means or what should have been done or not.

The situation is so dramatic that the Minister of Interior for the Flemish region, Mr Bourgeois, has declared that he is very worried because several cities have already said that they have found some problems while testing the old infrastructure.

This doesn't mean that the new model of evoting which should be tested should be installed as such. There is too little democratic control and oversight in the Belgian evoting process to be sure that nothing can go wrong. Off course it is only by limiting the number of elections that the interest of our citizens for the electoral process will increase. Having to vote 6 times in 8 years is really too much and is not good for anybody - and surely not the democracy and policy. Living with the fear and probability that you will have another electoral process or atmosphere in a year or so just makes any courageous policy or compromise impossible.