[pp.int.general] European citizens' Initiative - ID requirement & data retention

[Eduardo Robles Elvira]

On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 12:22 PM, Jerry Weyer
<jerry.weyer at piratepartei.lu> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Francisco George
> <francisco.george at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> In Spain this is quite common.
>>
>> To be legally accepted a petition for example must include ID's Number
>> included as well a the address of signatories.
>>
>> In the last general elections, parties that were not represented in
>> Congress or Senate, have been forced to collect signatures to backup their
>> candidature, the official document had to include too ID's number and Zip
>> Code of the residence.
>>
>> Oficial public state bulletins everyday publishes ID's Number and
>> residence of candidates to public exams to become functionaries.
>
>
> And residence is not enough to verify signatures?
>
> It differs from member state to member state which ID number is used. If in
> Spain people are used to provide an ID number when signing petitions it's
> ok. In other countries it is not. I wanted to inform those people that live
> in countries where the requirement of ID number would make it much more
> difficult to collect signatures to lobby for a more accessible ECI.

Hi:

Please explain me how can residence be enough to verify a signature.
Moreover, please tell me how do you plan to verify that residence. If
specifying residence was enought, then someone from Abu Dhabi could
set the residence field to "France" and then sign. Then do it again,
and again, until 1 million signatures is reached, for example.

Providing ID number as others suggested doesn't exactly provide much
more safeguard than that, either. It allows at least for the people
appearing in that list to be able to say "hey, I did not sign that!",
but then again they have no proof: they could be lying. Using
something like electronic identity card signatures (like electronic
DNI in Spain) together with a server-side signature and timestamping
would provide non-repudiation from both sides, the signers of the
petitions and the administration when showing that somebody really
signed a petition.

Regards,
    Eduardo.