Halt e-voting, says Electoral Commission

Trials of electronic voting and vote-counting should be halted until the government can come up with a good reason for using the technology, the Electoral Commission has said.

E-voting has been undergoing a series of trials in local elections across the UK, but the Electoral Commission, in a report, said that no further trials were necessary — for the moment.

"We have learnt a good deal from pilots over the past few years," said Peter Wardle, the Electoral Commission's chief executive. "But we do not see any merit in continuing with small-scale, piecemeal piloting where similar innovations are explored each year without sufficient planning and implementation time, and in the absence of any clear direction or likelihood of new insights."

The Electoral Commission suggested that the security of e-voting systems needed to be beefed up in any future implementations, and reiterated its support for a system of individual voter registration as a prerequisite to further trials.

A spokesperson for the Commission told ZDNet.co.uk on Thursday that a "robust electoral modernisation strategy" was needed to justify any further exploration of e-voting. "There is not a clear direction and a clear reason [for e-voting and e-counting]," the spokesperson said.

This stance was echoed by Jason Kitcat of the Open Rights Group, an organisation that monitored the latest round of e-voting trials. "[The report] shows a complete lack of strategy as to why we're doing this," he told ZDNet.co.uk. "No strategic plan has been published or consulted on, and there has been no consultation to parties or candidates or the general public. There is no clarity on what [the government] want."

Kitcat also detailed some of the problems that had been encountered in the latest e-voting trials. "There were severe problems with timetables, procurement and management — the same problems that were apparent in previous pilots," he said. "E-counting is a slightly different issue, but also problematic. In theory it is not so bad because [it involves] bits of paper, but if they want to pursue e-counting they need to be clear why we're having it. The costs and risks do not seem to match up with the very minor benefits."

"In many cases [the counting] took much longer because of software errors and calibration issues," Kitcat continued. "The pieces of paper were not all printed in precisely the same way — 2mm differences [in printing] were enough to throw the machine. A large proportion had to be manually adjudicated."

The Ministry of Justice, which handles electoral issues, told ZDNet.co.uk that a "modernisation strategy" on e-voting was currently being drafted that would properly explain the justification for the scheme.

However, electoral modernisation minister Michael Wills insisted that the pilots "show the public want additional voting channels" and had been "an important part of developing public services that are efficient, effective, empowering and responsive to needs and demands of citizens".

"These evaluations point to instances where e-counting and e-voting have worked well, and where electors choose to vote remotely by internet or telephone they often had favourable responses to these innovations," said Wills. "The purpose of pilots is to learn lessons for the future and we will do so. We are pleased that the evaluations point to a high level of system security and user confidence in e-voting systems tested and that the security and integrity of the polls was not compromised."