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