A secure democratic Net is a fundamental right

you have maybe heard that the new government had to make very quickly during a weekend a budget before the markets opened - who were beginning to speculate quite heavily that they couldn't accomplish this

that budget also had to introduce around 11 billion of economies and new taxes at the same time

and it had to be accepted by the bureaucracy in the European Commission

but as you could have foreseen the European Commission wanted some buffers and so demanded an extra effort. That extra was the blocking of all new investments during the first months of this government

one of these blocked investments was the part that the federal government would have paid for buying the new electronic voting computers (with paper proof - I have tested it and liked it more or less even if some procedures should be introduced so that people don't walk out with their paper vote for example)

so the flemish government which is a partisan of the system (while the walloon government is more opposed and the Brussels government is in between) will have to pay 20% extra for the material which they didn't plan to do

so we could all be going back to paper and pen in the communal elections in october

maybe somebody is thinking that it isn't that bad, that it is more important to have a good working electronic system for the election of 2014 when several elections are following each other or being held at the same time (federal, european and regional)

Washington DC had a problem. Between the primaries and the general elections there was not enough time to follow the strict paper procedures to inform the and handle the voters overseas (for example Military). Voters overseas have always been the locomotive for the evoting train and some seem very open to the idea. By the way we shop online and do our taxes online, so why not vote online.

Because there is no worse election than a rigged election or when there are doubts about the results of the election. And I don't say that paper elections are without mistakes but in Holland they are going to concentrate on a scanning technology for the paper ballots so that it is easier to count and less mistakes could be made. The paper elections have some mistakes but except in small local elections were every vote counts (and recounts are part of the process) these don't have a real influence on the number of elected representatives. The problem with electronic elections is that a manipulation of the system and the tendency is possible. You could manipulate in theory an electronic voting process with only a few machines and complices. 

But the advocates of this industry say that they will use different checks and controls throughout the process so that the electronic process itself will be safer. The problem with that is - as the Dutch concluded after years of research - that when you do that as it should be - the total cost will be enormous and even than that it won't be futureproof - as hacking and attacktechnology advances faster than defensive technologies.

So a test in Washington DC with a mailbased evoting system was suspended after whitehat hackers penetrated the system and showed that it could be manipulated. One should also take into account that with the number of Americans serving or living overseas and that the presidential elections in the US were very narrow (or according to some even stolen) victories a possibility of rigging a few thousand votes from overseas could make a state or district (and an election) fall into the hands of the other party.

The hackers just changed the website, but according to change the evoting website they had access to everything and could change anything (for example the operations behind the voting buttons).

The system was open source (the myth of secure open source) and was tested internally but not by independent institutions - as is the case with the voting booths (even if those sometimes also pose big problems).

The 300.000 $ are down the drain because some stupid security mistake could be manipulated by a student.

The dutch rest their case again - invest in technology to treat the paper ballots so the humans make less mistakes.

And to hell with the news that wants election results right after the closing of the voting stations.

It is not because we have a result that we have a government :)  from Belgium