Remote voting

Currently there are two ongoing initiatives in the Netherlands wrt. to voting via the web or via phone.

Hoogheemraadschap Rijnland

A hoogheemraadschap is a regional goverment body for water management. Its officials are elected via ordinary mail, but the voter participation for these elections is typically fairly low. An experiment with election via the internet is planned in Rijnland for 2004, with potentially 1 million voters participating.

Details about the system (called RIES, for Rijnland Internet Election System) are not available at this stage.

Ministry of Internal Affairs

The ministry of internal affairs is preparing to organise an experiment with "remote voting" (via web and telephone) for the election of the European Parliament on 10 june 2004. Participation is intended for expatriats, who currently have the option to vote by mail. It is typically used by 20-30 thousand people, of the about 600.000 potential participants. The website that will be used is www.internetstembureau.nl.

The remote voting project is described in "Definitierapport kiezen op afstand". The main lines of the system are as follows. Voters register by ordinary "snail" mail, and choose their own accesscode as password. In return they receive a votecode as "login", together with a list of candidates, each with his/her own candidatecode. There will be 1000 different lists.

The system is being built by LogicaCMG, but the ministery owns the source code. Hence it can be made public, as is intended.

The responsible minister, De Graaf, reports in his letter to parliament of 8 okt. 2003 that the system has been discussed in a meeting on 25 aug. 2003 with external experts, coming from academia (including Bart Jacobs) and industry, see the their findings in an attachement to this letter (at the end). They urge the ministry to: be more open, separate concerns, pay more attention to fraud from within, perform more tests and evaluations (by independent parties), and improve logging.

The same attachment reports in section 4.2 on the user experiment that took place in the week of 25--31 aug. 2003. The report mentions some shocking failures, including loss of votes, double votes, low performance, and interrupted logging. There will be a new experiment in the week of 3--10 nov. 2003.

The same letter to parliament also contains a risc analysis.

The final decision whether or not to use this system will be announced to parliament before 30 nov. 2003.

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