dijous, 22 de febrer del 2007

1er. Congreso sobre Democracia Digital y Participación Ciudadana

Durante los próximos 22 y 23 de marzo la ciudad de Tarragona organiza el 1er. Congreso sobre Democracia Digital y Participación Ciudadana. Dentro de este congreso una de las sesiones paralelas se dedicará al voto electrónico, siendo así también el IV Votobit organizado por el Observatorio del Voto Electrónico (OVE) de la Universidad de León.
Mi participación en el mismo será en la mesa del viernes 23, entre las 9 y las 10,30 dedicada a los "Aspectos sociales y accesibilidad de las nuevas tecnologías. Los peligros de la fractura democrática", junto con Manuel Sanromà, Enrique Martínez y Eduard Aibar y moderados por Julio Español.

E-voting in Estonia (2)

La OSCE desplegará una misión de observación en Estonia, en la que se volverá a utilizar el voto electrónico remoto de forma vinculante. En el enlace del título encontraréis información sobre la misión, con un informe inicial, así como la lista de miembros de la delegación. Como siempre lamentamos que nuestro país no tome parte en la misma, al menos en este ámbito concreto. Así nos va...

Y otro más... (esta vez Honolulu)

La paradisíaca Honolulu va a utilizar el voto electrónico remoto para la elección de los consejos vecinales (neighborhood boards). El responsable tecnológico es Commercial Data Systems Inc., y algunas declaraciones que pueden leerse en The Honolulu Advertiser son interesantes: "Online voting is not to be confused with electronic voting machines," declaró el secretario ejecutivo de los Consejos Vecinales. "Neighborhood board voters will be allowed to vote securely from any computer with Internet access, as opposed to the electronic voting machines used in state elections."
Ya conocemos que el debate en los EEUU sobre las diversas modalidades de voto electrónico es muy vivo, por lo que esta experiencia puede ser muy interesante.

E-voto remoto vinculante (...otro país más)

La web de Scytl anuncia que La Comisión Electoral de Filipinas (COMELEC) ha otorgado a esta firma catalana un contrato para llevar a cabo las primeras elecciones vinculantes a través de Internet en Filipinas. Los aproximadamente 30.000 filipinos no residentes registrados en Singapur podrán votar a través de la plataforma segura de voto electrónico de Scytl en las próximas elecciones al Congreso y al Senado de las Filipinas que tendrán lugar en mayo de 2007.
Robert Krimmer ha mandado dos enlaces periodísticos que amplían la información:

Evoting.CC News #3

El E-voting.CC dirigido por Robert Krimmer ha publicado su tercer número del Newsletter. No voy a reproducirlo aquí, puesto que os aconsejo una visita a la web (enlace superior), y además porque también reproducimos algunas informaciones en otros posts que hemos actualizado hoy.

dilluns, 19 de febrer del 2007

E-voting in Estonia

As you surely know, the Estonian parliamentary elections will be held next March 4th 2007. For the second time in history, voters will be able to vote via Internet from Feb 26th to Feb 28th (during advance voting period). The Estonian National Electoral Committee will organize different events: the more interesting ar the following:

.- Saturday March 3rd at 16.00 in the Parliament Building, the White Hall: Presentation and discussion about the Estonian electoral system and e-voting project.
.- Sunday March 4th venue at 10.00 at the Parliament Building: Observation in polling stations (Tallinn) with local guides.
.- Sunday March 4th at 19.00 in the Parliament Building: Public opening and counting of e-votes, preliminary voting results will be published.

At the moment, we don't know if we'll be able to attend, but we'll try to.

dimecres, 14 de febrer del 2007

EFVE

I'd like to present to all of you a new (at least for me) group that is getting formed, working about getting electiions verifiable. Here you have their web presentation, just copied and pasted:
EFVE wants elections to be verifiable by some reasonable portion of the voting public. This means that when push comes to shove people can go to the polling station, monitor their own elections, watch their votes be counted, and then go home assured that the election was honest. The current trend in many European countries is to introduce 'e-Voting' (voting on machines in the polling station) and even i-Voting (voting over the Internet). Many of the methods used place a very high level of trust in a very limited number of people. Often the software running in the machines is kept secret, and there is no verification that the software that was once inspected is even running in the machines that the public votes on.
EFVE thinks this is bad, and wants to offer a platform to people from all over Europe that resist e-Voting and i-Voting in their own countries. For the time being, EFVE is mostly concerned with bringing together already active activists and existing movements, as well as with documenting the state of e/i-Voting and the resistance against it in various European countries.

E-voting pilots in UK

The Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) will run twelve pilot schemes in the May 2007 local elections to test different ways of modernising the electoral system. The types of pilots include e-voting, e-counting, advance voting and signing for ballot papers in polling stations.
Find here a short but interesting overview of the details.

dijous, 8 de febrer del 2007

E-voto en la Junta de Accionistas de Endesa

Endesa ha hecho pública la convocatoria de su Junta General Extraordinaria de Accionistas (véase, entre otros, La Vanguardia de hoy, páginas 76-77). Dejando de lado el contexto económico, nuestro interés se sitúa en la posibilidad que brinda a sus accionistas (como otras compañías) para expresar y/o delegar su voto mediante procedimientos electrónicos.
En cuanto a "la emisión del voto a distancia" se señala como requisitos que el accionista disponga de firma electrónica reconocida o avanzada, cuyo certificado haya sido emitido por la Autoridad Pública de Certificación Española (CERES) dependiente de la Fábrica Nacional de Moneda y Timbre. Asimismo podrá utilizarse también el DNI electrónico (eDNI), para lo cual en ambos casos deberá accederse a la web de endesa, en su apartado de voto y delegación a distancia.
Más allá de otros detalles menores, lo interesante es la normalidad con que se asume la utilización de las NTICs en un ámbito tan relevante como es el empresarial. Aunque sería altamente interesante contar con más datos sobre su funcionamiento y la aceptación/valoración de estos procesos, lo interesante es la disonancia con la que discurren el mundo empresarial y económico y el mundo político. Asumiendo las diferencias existentes entre ambos, no es menos cierto que el entorno económico se sitúa muy por delante del político, donde ni siquiera existen proyectos serios en nuestro país para facilitar el voto remoto a aquellos conciudadanos residentes en el extranjero, a quienes seguimos confinando a la utilización -a menudo costosa y terriblemente lenta- del voto postal. ¿Algo podemos aprender de estos ejemplos, verdad?

divendres, 2 de febrer del 2007

E-Voting.CC Community News | Issue 02

Our colleague Robert Krimmer (e-voting.cc) has released the second issue of E-voting.CC Community News, with a lot of very interesting topics.

Short News
- UK E-Voting Pilots announced
- European Electronic Voting Activism Workshop in London Feb, 8th
- Ron Rivest on how to do Recounts

E-Voting.CC Activities
- Extended Deadline for 2nd PhD Seminar
- E-Voting.CC Database of E-Voting Uses is growing

Conferences
- EVT07 - Electronic Voting Technology Workshop Aug, 6th 07
- Eastern Europe E-Gov Days Prague, Apr, 11-13th 07
________________________________________________________________________
Dear
Readers!
Welcome to our second edition of the E-Voting.CC newsletter. A lot has happened in the past weeks, including some notable events in the United Kingdom, like the announcement of the pilot scheme for the may local Elections and an upcoming European E-Voting Actisim workshop taking place next week in London. Furthermore I wrote a guest commentary for the Public Servant magazine on the issues involved with electronic voting, i.e. meeting the peoples need for transparency and mobility. From our side we used the last weeks to consolidate the mailinglists we've been running (E-Gov, Online-Wahlen, E-Voting-in-Europe, ...) and moved them to a new server which also had the benefit of having a new mailman version that helps with SPAM protection a lot. I would like to thank also the readers of the first newsletter that actually went right away to enter data in our worldwide database of e- voting uses - we got 25 examples right away. In case you haven't done so, please fill the survey out at
http://db.e-voting.cc or mail us your results/working papers to office@e-voting.cc. In case you have recommendations or think that something you know should be included in this newsletter, please send them to us!
Thanks for your support,
Robert Krimmer
________________________________________________________________________

UK E-Voting Pilots announced ____________________________________
A little bit later than expected, the Department for Constitutional Affairs finally announced the UK pilots on E-Voting for this May's local Election. On 29 January 2007, thirteen local authorities were approved to take part in twelve electoral pilot schemes for the May 2007 local elections. They were approved following an application process open to all local authorities. Both the Electoral Commission and the Association of Electoral Administrators have been fully consulted and involved in the selection process. The local authorities are:
* Bedford Borough Council
* Breckland District Council
* Broxbourne Council
* Dover District Council
* Gateshead Council
* Rushmoor Borough Council
* Sheffield City Council
* Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough Council
* South Bucks District Council
* Stratford-on-Avon District Council and Warwick District Council
* Sunderland City Council
* Swindon Borough Council
Find more at
http://www.dca.gov.uk/elections/elections-may-07.pdf

European Electronic Voting Activism Workshop in London Feb, 8th __
We are not only expecting E-Voting trials in the UK but also a very informed public about problems and hacks with E-Voting. The Open Rights Group is organizing an European Electronic Voting Activism workshop next Week, with live demonstration of the Nedap hack and a panel of experts including Margaret McGaley (Ireland) Colm MacCarthaigh (Ireland) Anne-Marie Oostveen (The Netherlands) Rop Gonggrijp (The Netherlands) Dr Rebecca Mercuri (USA)
More information is available at
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2007/01/16/taking-the-lid-off-e-voting/

Ron Rivest on how to do Recounts ________________________________
The National Election Data Archive (NEDA) has released a short paper explaining a new formula developed by Ronald Rivest of MIT to estimate the minimum audit amounts that are mathematically sufficient to detect vote count errors that could seat wrong candidates. NEDA's paper and an easy-to-use spreadsheet to allow any layman to calculate how many vote counts to audit for a particular election contest, can be found at ElectionArchive.org.
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/ElectionAuditEstimator.pdf http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/HowManyToAudit.xls

E-Voting.CC Database of E-Voting Uses is growing _________________
Thanks to your help we have already more than 25 E-Voting uses in our database. Please continue to support our database. As you know E-Voting.CC is currently putting together the state of the art in Electronic Voting. To do this we are conducting a study on the experience in trials, test as well as legally binding elections using means of electronic voting. Please go to
http://db.e-voting.cc to take part and support our effort to document all e-voting uses worldwide!

Extended Deadline for 2nd PhD Seminar ____________________________
Due to numerous requests we have extended the Deadline for the 2nd PhD Seminar till 14th of February. Until then please send us your 10 page abstract of your phd and a short cv to
tagung-ewahlen@e-voting.cc. Find more at http://www.e-voting.cc/stories/3154903/

EVT07 - Electronic Voting Technology Workshop ____________________
EVT '07 Call for Papers
http://www.usenix.org/events/evt07/cfp/2007
USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop (EVT '07) August 6, 2007 Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Sponsored by USENIX: The Advanced Computing Systems Association, and
ACCURATE: A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections EVT '07 will be co-located with the 16th USENIX Security Symposium (Security '07), August 6–10, 2007.
Important Dates
Submissions due: Sunday, April 22, 2007, 11:59 p.m. PDT Notification of acceptance: Friday, June 1, 2007 Final files due: Thursday, June 28, 2007
Full call is online, but note that usability and accessibility are areas of particular interest.
In particular, we welcome papers considering:
- Design and analysis of electronic voting schemes and protocols
- Deployment and lifecycle concerns
- Mitigating threats (including insider threats)
- Usability and accessibility (both for voters and for administrators)
- Legal issues, including how voting systems must comply with the ADA and HAVA, or the effect of intellectual property rights and nondisclosure agreements on voting system testing, certification, and deployment
- The technology standards process and how it should evolve

5th Eastern Europe E-Gov Days ____________________________________
5th Eastern Europe eGov Days 11.-13. April 2007, Prague
All member states of the enlarged Europe are facing the challenge of ICT enabled transformation of traditional ways of Governance, ensuring efficient and inclusive eGovernment and decision making. The Eastern Europe eGov Days as a joint event are providing a solid platform for learning from each other and for ensuring technology transfer between Eastern Europe countries and Western Europe, bringing advantages to the whole community. The joint event 2007 will take place in Prague and so continuing the very successful 2006 event. The eGovernment take-up in Europe has brought a lot of new issues to solve, including specific technologies and approaches for better eGovernment services for business and governmental cooperation.
Thematic sessions will include issues like:
- Technologies for eGovernment and decision making
- Change Management for eGovernment
- eGovernment to eBusiness (SMEs eGovernment, G2B interoperability)
- Transfer of knowledge for eGovernment solutions
- Creating value from Public Sector Information
- ERP systems in governmental setings
- eGovernment in municipailities and regions
- Teaching and training eGovernment

Contact ____________________________________________________

E-Voting.CC Competence Center for Electronic Voting and Participation
Robert Krimmer
Director, Founder
Liechtensteinstrasse 143/3
A-1090 Vienna, Austria
Phone: +43 (664) 2055990
Fax: +43 1 3193955
E-Mail: office@e-voting.cc
WWW:
http://www.e-voting.cc