A coalition of technical, legal and political experts launched a campaign on 4 November to ensure that electronic voting can be trusted by voters and politicians across Europe.

Voters and candidates must be able to feel certain that voting intentions are accurately recorded. If any doubts do arise then all stake-holders must be able to verify and audit all aspects of the election. Without these protections, debacles such as the count of votes in the US presidential elections of 2000 are likely to be repeated on this side of the Atlantic. This could destroy voter trust in the electoral system and politics more widely.

Computerised voting is inherently subject to programming error, human error, equipment malfunction and malicious tampering. Due to the opaque nature of the technologies involved, which few understand, it is crucial that electronic voting systems provide a voter-verifiable audit trail. This is a permanent record of each vote that can be checked for accuracy by the voter before the vote is submitted, and is difficult or impossible to alter after it has been checked. This must be achieved without compromising the secrecy and integrity of the ballot.

E-voting systems lacking these safeguards are being rushed upon voters across Europe with little regard for the risks and the costs to our democracies. In Ireland, France, Spain and the UK trials were held. E-voting is already established in Belgium and Switzerland. In Denmark, Estonia, the Netherlands and in some German municipal authorities trials will be organised within a year. The European Commission is looking at introducing e-voting across the EU, and the Council of Europe is developing guidelines for elections involving e-voting. See also EDRI-gram nr. 16.

The campaign is calling on all concerned European citizens to sign up to a resolution demanding a voter-verifiable audit trail. Ian Brown, one of the campaign founders and director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research (EDRI-member), commented: "Unsafe e-voting systems could prove a very expensive way to destroy voter trust in elections. Governments need to look at less gimmicky ways of increasing public involvement in politics."

Another EDRI-member, Mikko Valimaki, chairman of Electronic Frontier Finland (EFFI) added: "We have already seen real problems with e-voting machines in the US. One candidate in the 2000 US elections was awarded -16,022 votes due to a technical error. While this problem was fixed in time, in a democratic society we cannot tolerate software or hardware errors in the voting system."

Sign the resolution
http://www.free-project.org/resolution/

FIPR E-democracy file
http://www.fipr.org/eDemocracy/

American file on electronic voting
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/