Sat, Nov 21 2009

Rene Beekman

Offline: e-vote to failure

Fri, Apr 17 2009 10:00 CET byRene Beekman 1413 Views
With about two months to go before general elections, the Bulgarian Parliament decided it would experimentally introduce e-voting at the 2009 elections. How e-voting is going to work exactly is anyone’s guess at this point as the precise procedure still has to be decided on.

All that is known for now is that there would be no online e-voting as many Bulgarians abroad hoped for. Instead, 50 to 60 polling stations would be outfitted with a computerised system and a magnetic card reader. The timing of the decision raises a series of questions at the very least.

Two months until general elections leaves no time for a transparent procurement procedure, which means machines would have to be bought using less transparent mechanisms and under the maximum budget allowed for expenditures without procurement. The member of parliament who tabled the proposal, Svetoslav Spassov, was quoted by Bulgarian daily Dnevnik as saying that such machines could be bought in India for as little as 200 euro a piece, or roughly the price of a Microsoft Windows licence.

Undoubtedly over the coming weeks we will be hearing a lot of accusations of conflicts of interest and lack of quality of the machines that will ultimately be bought. Looking abroad, experiences with e-voting machines have not always been very encouraging.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has an entire section of its website dedicated to problems with e-voting and e-voting machines, including "flawed electronic voting machines and related election procedures", loss of votes because of technical issues, lack of transparency in whether or not - and how - votes are registered and tabulated, as well as the use of "black box" software that has not been publicly reviewed for security. According to the EFF, when these machines were inspected "serious vulnerabilities" were found "all too often".

The two months left until Bulgarian general elections hardly leave enough time to train election workers for potential problems with e-voting machines, which has in the past led to technicians abroad being left with unsupervised access to voting machines. It is to be feared that the "flawed election procedures", pointed out by the EFF, will be unavoidable at this year’s elections.

Recent elections in Bulgaria have been plagued by accusations of vote-buying. Based on the decision taken by Parliament, it looks like this year we will see accusations of rigged voting machines, technicians who allegedly modified voting outcomes and a long list of procedural problems for those who decide to try out the new e-voting system.  

Regardless how many Bulgarians opt to use e-voting, this experiment could be set up to fail. If it does, it will be because Parliament did not take the time to properly prepare and introduce changes in legislation. But I’m sure they will find other scapegoats.

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