[pp.int.general] Online voting versus online discussion

[alexis.roussel]

Hi,

In Geneva canton, citizens, through a vote, have accepted to use internet voting. What was not written in the law was that the internet voting system was a black-box.

The state gives many arguments around security and intellectual property (they want to sell it) to keep the code source closed. Of course all the IT and scientific community is having no confidence in the system. But still it is on the political agenda, and being pushed forward.

As Swiss Pirates we have no fixed opinion yet between pro or against internet voting. We have even developed our own evote system.

In the mean time, there was a bug in our national evote (someone could vote twice by accident) that was described as a technical glitch solved professionally by removing one of the 2 votes (!!!!!!!!).

Among the citizens there is no clear picture pro or against. Many believe that if you can trust ebanking you can trust evote. This is the first point we focus on our communication. 

Also we have decided to push for the best implementation. And publishing the code is our objective.

So in Geneva, we have requested the access to the source code. It was granted to the pirates and we are now able to analyse the code. The report will be available in Feb.

This approach has given us much media attention and a lot of credibility. At the point where one day we had an alleged problem on the evote system, the journalist had called me before calling the state... to get a detail of the problem....

If this approach is succesfull 2 things can happen:
1. We have an evoting system that is slowly moving to an open source model and including all caracterestics of a trustworthy evote system
2.. evote will stop because it is a too expensive system for a state to develop.

In any case i recommend this approach where ever evoting is happenning. 

To assist me I was only able to get people from geneva. In less than 24h i had in the team 3 top specialists including a crypto expert.

So i you do such exercise, if you call for help it should come .

If you want more details about geneva experience, dont hesitate to ask.

Alexis Roussel / Vice President Pirate Party SwitzerlandZbigniew Łukasiak <zzbbyy at gmail.com> wrote:Short version:

online voting - no
(http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/10/155536-internet-voting-in-the-us/fulltext)

online discussion - yes

Longer version:

Comming from the Open Source world I am surprised by the scarcity of
international disscussion in the Pirate Movement.  This list and the
PirateTimes are perhaps the only places where the international pirate
topics are discussed.  This is not enough - if that was an Open Source
project you'd have many individual blogs and many more mailing lists
where people would discuss stuff from many angles and also in more
personal less formal ways.

I have the feeling that all that discussion that does not happen
online is then crammed into the General Assemblies.  In my opinion GAs
should be just a matter of recording the consensus on matters that
would be exhaustingly discussed online.  That is not to say that
discussion would be forbidden - only that we should try to avoid it.

Online voting is a can of worms - it can probably work well for
non-secret voting - but to get it right is much more difficult than it
seems.  Especially in the context of international negotiations we
cannot put so much faith in the  administators of the system.  And
please read the paper linked above.
Of course discussion systems are subject of similar concerns - but it
does not need to be so centralized - and beside that it would be
subject to the supervision of the safe, in person, GA.


--
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/
http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/
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