A secure democratic Net is a fundamental right

 http://www.dekamer.be/FLWB/pdf/52/1281/52K1281001.pdf

1. in verband met de volgende verkiezingen

a. bij de volgende stembusgang van juni 2009, in alle kieskantons de papieren stembiljetten te gebruiken met manuele stemopneming;

b. te voorzien in een opwaardering van het presentiegeld dat wordt toegekend aan de bijzitters in de stem- en de stemopnemingsbureaus12;

2. in verband met de keuze voor een stemsysteem na 2009:

a. een echte vergelijkende studie van de gebruikte stemsystemen te verrichten: stemming op papier, elektronische stemming alsook stemming op papier gecombineerd met stemopneming middels optische lezing

b. alvorens enige beslissing te nemen, een raming te maken van de kosten die worden veroorzaakt door een veralgemening van het verbeterd elektronisch stemsysteem met behulp van een papieren drager, zoals het universitair consortium voorstelt;

c. er ongeacht de gekozen oplossing voor te zorgen dat de gemeenten geen bijkomende fi nanciële lasten moeten dragen.

To make Election Day, award-winning director Katy Chevigny fielded 14 film crews to capture the action vérité-style in a diverse range of locations, including Chicago; the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota; Dearborn, Mich.; Cincinnati and Shaker Heights, Ohio; Orlando and Quincy, Fla.; St. Louis; New York; the little town of Sapulpa, Okla.; and the even tinier Stockholm, Wis. Election Day is as fast-paced and suspenseful as a thriller, with vote counts and political activism substituting for shootouts and car chases. The heroes of the day are ordinary Americans determined to vote, to turn out others to vote, and to see that the voting is legally and fairly done.

The good news in Election Day is that more and more Americans are bringing their passion for democracy to the polls, drawing unprecedented numbers of voters eager to make the most of their right to cast a ballot and have it counted. Taking place in the long shadow of 2000's bitterly contested presidential vote, the 2004 election also brought more scrutiny of polling-place practices from citizens as well as international observers. One beacon of democracy and validation of the electoral system captured by the film came when little Quincy, Fla., a town in the state's panhandle with a 70 percent black population, finally elected its first black sheriff since the 1800s.

The bad news in Election Day is that close scrutiny of American elections finds a surprisingly antiquated system, which often works as much to frustrate voter participation as to encourage it and which harbors wide disparities in access between rich and poor neighborhoods. The presence of international observers suddenly seems not so out-of-place when one observer finds confusion and two-hour waits in St. Louis's poor, predominately black precincts while wealthier white neighborhoods have smoothly operating polling places  More

watch the film online during JULY for free

For Europeans who still think that the US election is about character scandals, stupidity news flashes and that voters don't care over there because they are 'too stupid' this is a must see.  American elections are won street by street, voting booth by voting booth and issue by issue, ...... you won't think anymore that American elections are taken more serious by the world than by Americans themselves.

Votes for London Mayor and the 25 member London Assembly were counted electronically, and overall the election was well-managed by the independent body set up to run elections in London, London Elects.

However, transparency around the recording of valid votes was a major issue, leading many of our team of 27 official observers to conclude that they were unable to observe votes being counted. And while hundreds of screens set up by vote scanners showed almost meaningless data to observers, London Elects admit that the system was likely to be recording blank ballots as valid votes.

The report also details how London Elects are unable to publish an audit, commissioned from KPMG, of some of the software used to count the London vote, because of disputes over commercial confidentiality. The situation highlights the problems that arise when the very public function of running elections is mixed with issues of commercial confidentiality and proprietary software. In the context of a public election, it is unacceptable that these issues should preclude the publication of the KPMG audit.

London Elects will pay Indra – the company who supplied both Bedford and Breckland during last year’s chaotic trials of e-counting technology in local elections – upwards of £4.5 million for delivering the London e-count. Today’s report recommends a full cost benefit analysis of any future e-count, set against a properly costed manual count.

ORG’s report into e-counting of votes cast in the London Elections is out today They are also the source for this posting.

The Belgian parlementarians busy with evoting should read this report carefully because it is full of things that should interest them so they won't make the same mistakes

Don't trust those companies but control them permanently because otherwise you can have this

* In 2004 Stephen Heller alerted officials in California that Diebold, Inc.—the infamously partisan, right-wing manufacturer of hackable electronic-voting machines—had been using illegal software in the state’s voting machines. Furthermore, he aired allegations that Diebold had planned to lie about using the software just prior to one of our nation’s most contentious Presidential elections. Heller’s reward for alerting authorities to Diebold’s crime-in-progress? Three felony counts and the prospect of almost four years in the slammer.

* The other big evotingmachine firm Hart Intercivic has also a case running against a whistleblower.

You could also trust the counting machines that does the counting of the votes

* After New Jersey's February presidential primary election, 60 Sequoia Advantage DRE (also called touch-screen) voting machines were found to have voter turnout totals that did not match the totals on the machines' memory tapes.  And in Ohio's March presidential primary, the Diebold (AKA Premier) GEMS central tabulator in Butler County failed to record the votes from one of the memory cards fed into it, despite reporting that data from all memory cards had been successfully uploaded. This Ohio discrepancy has only recently come to light as Butler County elections chose to disclose the problem.

* Palm Beach County elections officials said Friday they are investigating why they failed to quickly count more than 700 votes in a special election that marked the county's first experience with optical scanners.
A 707-vote disparity between an unofficial vote tally Tuesday and a final count two days later in a West Palm Beach City Commission race has spawned another wave of criticism and questions about Supervisor of Elections Arthur Anderson's ability to run an error-free election. Unofficial results reported a few hours after the election showed 4,085 votes cast. The next day, a computerized audit signaled a problem — three vote-counting machines apparently had collected votes that weren't counted.

And what to do if a machine fails or gives incorrect answers ?

* However, when a voter's vote appears to jump from one candidate or issue to another, when the machine fails to respond, or when vote on the paper tape shows the vote to be incorrect, the voter will know there's a problem. "If the voting machine you use behaves in an illegal manner, it should be treated as part of a crime scene. The theft of your vote is a crime by the voting machine and its vendors against YOU. Treat it as such," says Paddy Shaffer, Director of the OEJC.  The OEJC encourages voters and pollworkers who are aware of these types of problems with voting machines to report the problems to law enforcement. "These machines should not be returned to local election officials but rather quarantined by independent investigative authorities," says Shaffer.

Standards are for suckers (who believe they will be followed)

* Last February, SysTest labs wrote its certification test report for a new voting system manufactured by Diebold/Premier. The report listed the 79 problems the lab found during testing. Even so, SysTest recommended the system be certified by the EAC.

Well, those who organize have their own opinion about these machines

* the Co-Chair of the New York State Board of Elections (SBOE), Doug Kellner, who has said, “The voting industry sells crap, and that is the problem”. Ananda goes on to relate problems discovered with voting machines once they get to the counties, after SBOE testing. One county has complained that their Sequoia Ballot Marking Device (BMD)[voting machines for voters with disabilities that mark a ballot but do not tabulate the results] printers jam. It seems that Sequoia knows all about this defect but has neglected to mention it to the counties

How a programmer can make an election the way he is paid to do

* The House Committee on Elections invited Curtis, a computer programmer from Florida, to testify Wednesday on the accuracy, risks, benefits and security of electronic voting technology. The committee also heard from other expert witnesses, election officials and the Texas secretary of state. Curtis said a Florida representative approached him in 2000 to design "vote-flipping" software to help the congressman win an election. Requesting a fraudulent program for a machine is not illegal in Florida, but using one is. "You cannot trust electronic machines, no matter how many honest people you have. It only takes one person with access to the machine," said Curtis, an advocate for hand-counted paper ballots. "Programmers can be bought."

If we read the proposition that will be put before a vote by the majority tomorrow, than we can conclude the following.

First and allmost important, the use of the electronic voting system won't be compulsary in Belgium. It is up to the communes (which are the organizers of the elections here) to decide to use the electronic of the traditional system of voting.

Secondly we see in the decision that they didn't count anywhere in their decision that there are some serious questions that can be asked about the electronic voting system in Belgium that is proposed by the Universities.

* the use of RFID on the votes is something that is totally unbelievable because of the insecurities of the technology

* the total absence of a total absence of norms, standards and objective and attacking testing methods - even if the resolution mentions that it is possible that the evotingtechnology isn't maybe so safe as they thought it would be

* there is no repudiation of the proposition in the study that the counting of the papervote (proof) would be minimized, if not absent and would have no legal impact whatsoever. Maybe the cities should take here a decision about the methods and number of tests they could do to be sure that the technological results are correct before any tabulation is done.

* there is nothing foreseen to make sure that the whole election doesn't depend totally on technology and electricity. It should be possible and foreseen that if the technology or electricity doesn't work, papervotes would be available in sufficient numbers to continue the election.

* the auditing and supervision by the parliament of the development and preparation of the voting and the day itself isn't reinforced at all. The result is that there will be less supervision, less independent control and if there are incidents there the elections will be less legitimate and the problems afterwards will be much bigger.

For the time being we will vote with code and technology that is already 15 years old. If it would be an OS we would send it to Africa. (cynical bad taste joke).

During the hearings in the Belgian parliament about electronic voting it became clear that the new electronic system of voting would cost enormous lots of money. You must be an absolute believer in 'IT uber Alles' not to ask yourself if that is the best investment society can make.

Updating the present system costs 2,12 Euro for each vote but that is not an option because the code and the computers is too old and should be replaced totally. You can't argue that you would agree with an update or maintenance of the present system and still shout that you want a secure and authentic system.

The estimates about the costs of the new model as it has been designed by the so called interuniversity study would be about 13 Euro for each vote. And still the model hasn't been developed yet and as every professional knows these costs can still grow two or threefold once production has started and even than let's hope that securityresearchers and pentesters don't find things that will heighten the costs even more (as was the case in Holland).

As we said somewhat earlier the flemish representatives say that the paper proof of the vote is enough to find the system secure. As we have said before there are more things in that report about the paperproof that needs attention. It is not enough to have proof on paper, it is more important that those proofs are counted and that when mistakes are made they are accepted and have certain consequences.

The flemish representatives says that it is just about the money. This is cheap. Thinking that anyone who has some doubts about the efficiency of electronic voting just says this because he just like to receive more money to organise these elections without paying for them themselves is not acceptable.

There is another argument that the flemish representatives use as explanation for the No to electronic voting on the frenchtalking side. They say that they have more elderly and immigrant voters and those populations have more difficulty for using and casting their real intentional vote on these machines. This is an argument I really like.

So if you say that the french socialists are against electronic voting because the elderly and the immigrants have difficulty using this system and would have difficulty voting for their intention choice (french socialists is presumed here), than we are right to say that electronic voting is maybe not neutral and can influence the outcome of the elections (and sometimes every vote counts...). And if that is the case than the proposed system can't be used because it won't give every citizen, independent of his age or computercapacities, the same rights to express his vote exactly the way he intended to do and should have done if there wasn't that machine before him or her. The authenticity of the elections is more important.

I still think the way forward is to invest in new technology to count the votes more quickly and to do research in voting technology. Maybe in some years from here we will have find a system and a protocol that is so secure that we can't have any doubt anymore. For the moments, there are every time there is somewhere an electronic elections even more doubts and questions.

After the hearings in the federal parliament two representatives of the PS, the frenchspeaking socialist party introduced a proposal to hold the elections in 2009 in paper format and not electronic. During the hearings there was a representative from the anti-electronic vote campaign from Holland and he seems to have made quite an impression, or should we say that the decision by the Dutch governement to suspend Electronic voting and to concentrate on electronic counting of the paper votes has made a big impression. This dutch governmental decision was taken after that opposition groups showed that the anonimity of the votes could be broken and the researchers couldn't afterwards demonstrate clearly and without any doubt that one could build a system for electronic voting that would be authentic, safe and not too expensive.

There are many good reasons to do that and it doesn't mean that electronic voting is out of the picture for allways. There is no way to guarantee that organising electronic voting in 2009 would be without any risk if one knows that the computers and the voting code are very old. Secondly the interuniversity study as it was presented now is not an acceptable basis for discussion and debate because it is not complete and not objective enough. It is even so obvious that you sometimes just think why they didn't hide their intentions better. And third it is impossible to have a new system that can be audited, tested and accepted by the time that the elections should be held.

Another reason not to cry too quickly victory is that the regions may organize themselves their local and regional elections and so we can arrive at the situation in which flanders will organise its elections the electronic way while the other two regions may chose the paper vote or a combination. In flanders there is no tradition of debate and the flemish governement decided without any democratic debate in the parliament that it would invest 25 million Euro's in the development of the new model that the professors of the study presented to them. I think any firm would have a much more critical process before deciding such an investment and I can think of a thousand other things that could use that money.

De man die een tijdje geleden in het Belgische parlement kwam spreken op de hoorzittingen over de toekomst van de evoting. Hij is niet alleen een zeer belangrijk (ook historisch) digitale voorman maar tevens initiatiefnemer van "stemcomputers vertrouwen wij niet"

http://www.divshare.com/download/4732239-a85  Een overzichtje van waar de andere Europese landen mee staan op het vlak van evoting

It is a pity that sometimes a debate can go past the facts because there has never before been such a parliamentarian debate about evoting even if we are already using it for 10 years. Even the reports to the parliament by experts that work for the parliament about the elections they monitored wasn't really debated (nor do i think read). Not that there were many important things in it because it is a consensus report so much is hidden between the lines. But in every one of these reports there are facts that should have drawn their attention.

1. It is a debate between the Flemish – who like everything technological and advanced (like Lernaut and Hauspie ?) – and the French who are always so critical of technology and so fundamental about elections. It is true that it the hardest political critics can be found in the French speaking parties but the only professor (in informatics) that broke the omerta between the universities was from Antwerp and Flemish.  So this is a wrong debate and it just tries to hide the debate about the facts.

2. It is a debate between the technicians and some intellectuals who are always against technology and don’t understand how it works. A leading IT magazine in Belgium even called the technobelievers and IT industry to mobilize, throwing everything else like EID and egovernment in the battle. If we don’t believe in evoting, than we shouldn’t believe in EID or egovernment and all the rest. The fact of the matter is that most of the international research about evoting that has shown the flaws of evoting have been written by highly qualified iT researchers and professors. That they weren’t heard by the universities is just one proof of the relativity of the ‘quality’ of that report. 

This argument also falsifies the debate in another way. You don’t have to be a professor in IT or an engineer to discuss technology and the impact it can have on our lives and on society. Every concerned citizen has the right to pose his questions and to disagree. It is not because the debate is about technology that only engineers and consultants should have a say. This would be a form of enlightened despotism. That engineers don’t like to talk about the effects of their big ideas on our lives and society is another matter. That they sometimes don’t care about the effects and surely don’t like to have people that are not from their ‘class’ to have a say in or want control over their misunderstood beauties is their problem, not a democratic problem. The problem of our democracy in a technological society is that there is too few democratic controls on the technological choices and their consequences. 

3. The last point they try to make is that it is a political debate and that they only try to hurt a minister, the coalition or just something else like that. This is a typical way in which one tries to silence the questions some parties have in their own ranks. For the moment we have a good factual debate in the federal parliament and lets hope that it stays that way and that this argument won’t be used as a bulldozer. For the moment there are in every party people who listen to both sides of the argument.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rop_Gonggrijp

While growing up in Wormer in the Dutch Zaanstreek area, he became known as a teenage hacker and appeared as one of the main characters in Jan Jacobs's book "Kraken en Computers" ("Hacking and computers", Veen uitgevers 1985, ISBN 90-204-2651-6) which describes the early hacker scene in The Netherlands. Moved to Amsterdam in 1988. Founded the hacker magazine Hack-Tic in 1989. Was believed to be a major security threat by authorities in The Netherlands as well as in the USA.^[1] In the masthead of Hack-Tic, Gonggrijp described his role as hoofdverdachte ('prime suspect'). He was convinced that the Internet would radically alter society.^[2]

In 1993, a number of people surrounding Hack-Tic including Gonggrijp founded XS4ALL. It was the first ISP that offered access to the Internet for private individuals in the Netherlands. Gonggrijp sold the company to the former enemy Dutch-Telecom KPN1997. After he left XS4ALL, Gonggrijp founded ITSX, a computer security evaluation company, which was bought by Madison Gurkha in 2006. In 2001, Gonggrijp started work on the Cryptophone, a mobile telephone that can encrypt conversations.^[3]

Since 1989, Gonggrijp has been the main organizer of hacker events held every four years. Originally organized by the cast of Hack-Tic, these events have continued to live to this day.

Throughout the years, he has repeatedly shown his concerns about the increasing amount of information on individuals that government agencies and companies have access to. Rop held a controversial talk titled "We lost the war"^[4] at the Chaos Communication Congress 2005 in Berlin together with Frank Rieger.^[5]

In 2006 he founded the organization "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet" ("We do not trust voting computers") which campaigns against the use of electronic voting systems without a Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail and which showed in October 2006 on Dutch television how an electronic voting machine from manufacturer Nedap could easily be hacked.^[6]W

more

hoe hij aan zijn werk rond stemcomputers begon 

the reports about their research about the votingcomputers and the story and consequences

and as logical security wasn't enough, he is also an active lockpicker :)

We applaud that the parliament is going outside the strict discussions about technology that are being guided (manipulated) by engineers, managers, lobbyists, techno-believers and I-don't-care-at-all or Me-I-DON't-KNOW-NOTHING attitude and appears to be willing to listen to those that have some doubts and criticism. 

Next tuesday 10h 

It will be a good thing - because to hear what has happened and is happening in Holland. We thank the parliament for taking some time to listen to those experiences and thoughts also. Vooreva will present the Belgian opposition to evoting.  

As the new evoting proposal was being developed by a consortium of different universities, we thought that nobody would have the guts in these universities to speak out and at least pose some questions. But we were wrong and happy about it.

A professor ICT in Antwerp finds that the proposed model doesn't respond to the norms about accesability and usability and can have an influence on the votes of certain groups in the population. He also has some questions about the way the system will control mistakes and changes.

We applaud the interview of the professor as a starting point, but would invite him to base his case on the conclusions and propositions in the report itself. It may be that this is his opinion, but it would be too easy to discount this opinion if he doesn't proof his case with references to the report with which he doesn't agree.

This is the best method to go forward and have an open and technological discussion about why the present study has some faults that should be taken into consideration and could lead to the radical rethinking of the way we organize our elections. 

Out of the response of Bruno Seghers (ex Microsoft) we can make up that the EID is a critical part of this system and should have all the attention and investment needed to make it work as it should work. If we vote on paper or not.  

The Dutch government has decided that it will invest more money in technology to count to votes than in technology to replace the paper ballots by an electronic process. But as we have often said here. It is not about being for or against technology it is about the way that you do it. And you only do it if it is possible to be done on a responsable way. As with other software in other countries or parts of the UK this use of technology didn't lead to any problems.

The ecounting process in the last Scottisch elections had a few problems and one of them (a wrong excel file) even nearly led to proclaiming labor the bigger winner (while they were not). The parliamentary report has a lot of propositions and remarks and some of them may even be interesting for us.

One of the most remarkable is to start counting the day after the election and not during the day itself.

HBO made a film about the recounting scandal in 2000. Bush won the backroom fight, but did he win the election or was it just that Gore give up too fast at High Noon - in the interest of the State and the institutions. 4 years later in Ohio it was the same problem and again the Democrats didn't go all the way to dispute the way the election was handled.

This is a very beautiful slideshow of messed up technology that is being used in an important electoral process and can be responsable for drama and bring the country on the brink of a constitutional crisis. You can't redo elections just like that or because some machines broke down. Elections are organised at a particular moment in a particular mindset and redoing an election doesn't guarantee that this would give the same results. You can't ask the people to vote exactly as they did during the election that was declared void.

This is why it is very very important to be very prudent about the choice of technology, the controls of the technology before the election and the controls during the elections and when the results are being tallied and verified (between mechanic and paper results).

It is not because we are against anything electronic or because we don't know what to do with our time or just like being critical and being criticized all the time. It is only because democracy is too important to give it to the engineers and technobelievers without any controls.