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A member of Electronic Frontier Finland (Effi), a Finnish association for promoting digital rights and member of EDRi, has recently sent a request of information to the Finnish Ministry of Justice regarding their planned e-voting system. The system will be piloted in the municipal elections during October 2008 and it is based on a DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) type e-voting system from TietoEnator Finland and a Spanish back-end provider, Scytl.

In their response, the Ministry of Justice states that, based on the Act on the Openness of Government Activities, the documentation that has been written concerning the specific details of the e-voting system has to be kept secret on the Documents that have to be kept secret

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All Nedap/Groenendaal voting machines were decertified on 1 October 2007 by District Court of Alkmaar in the Netherland, following the 'Voting with confidence' advice issued on 27 September by Korthals Altes Committee (created with the purpose to verify the validity of the systems), and the announcement of the Secretary for the Interior that the 'Regulations for approval of voting machines 1997' would be withdrawn.

The action is the result of an administrative law procedure started by 'We do not trust voting computers' foundation in March 2007. The foundation had issued a report in October 2006 that had examined the Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B in operation in 8 out of the 9 poling stations in the Netherlands. The

On 2 August 2007, the Electoral Commission, independent body set up by the UK Parliament, recommended in its evaluation on the pilot schemes used in May 2007 elections to end electronic voting trials until the establishment of a strategy by the UK Government to modernise the electoral system and make it more secure.

The Electoral Commissions considers that there would be not much further to learn from any more electronic voting trials, as lessons have been gathered during the trials that took place during the last seven years when the Ministry of Justice commissioned thirteen local authorities in England to run pilot schemes. The Commission believes that it is time the government drafted a clear plan to change the way to run these elections.

"We have learnt a good deal from pilots over the past few years. But we do

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Findings of the Open Rights Group Election Observation Mission in Scotland and England The Open Rights Group (ORG) believes that the problems observed at the English and Scottish elections in May 2007 raise serious concerns regarding the suitability of e-voting and e-counting technologies for statutory elections. E-voting is a 'black box system', where the mechanisms for recording and tabulating the vote are hidden from the voter. This makes public scrutiny impossible, and leaves statutory elections open to error and fraud.
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/e-voting-main/
http://media.ito.com/kevinmarks/org_election_report.pdf

Article 29 Working Party Opinion 4/2007 on the concept of personal data

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(Article corrected on 10 May 2007)

The electronic counting system used in the Scottish Parliamentary Elections on 3 May 2007 experienced problems as experts had warned and the Scotland Office announced an urgent investigation on the "serious technical failures" having delayed the announcement of results in several areas.

Several counts were delayed and about 140 000 votes (approx. 7% of the total votes cast) were not counted, probably due to confusing ballot design. Tabulation software problems also emerged in the e-counting system being used for the first time in Scotland.

The independent Electoral Commission, set up by the Parliament to monitor elections, had previously advised against running elections using two different voting systems on the same

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The first round of the presidential elections in France, where e-voting systems have been used in 82 localities as a pilot test, showed many queues, some equipement shutdowns and dropouts of some towns (Amiens, St Malo, Le Perreux, Ifs). Some political parties have called the e-voting a "catastrophe", demanding the withdrawal of electronic voting machines for the second round of the presidential election .

However, the main two points of the e-voting criticism, as explained by Pierre Muller from Ordinateurs-de-vote.org, are the loss of control by the citizens with the risk of major untraceable fraud and the humiliation for a great number of electors. The latter is explained by the fact that at

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Estonia is the first nation in the world that will allow voting via the Internet during its elections for the Parliament (Riigikogu). The voting will take place on 4 March 2007, but the electronic vote will be cast from 26 February at 9 AM until 28 February 8 PM.

The system was tested first in the limited local elections in October 2005, when almost 10 000 people voted via the Internet. The number of Internet voters for these elections is estimated to increase to 20-40 000 voters, out of the 940 000.

The system for Internet voting is based on the mandatory state-issued ID card, that includes an electronic chip. The ID card can be used by introducing it in a reader attached to a computer and using 2 passwords. The

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Last week there were three e-voting events hosted in London by EDRI members, the Open Rights Group (ORG) and the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR).

On 6 February guests saw a screening of the documentary film "Hacking Democracy" which reveals in detail the failings of e-voting and e-counting systems in the United States.

After the film a lively panel, chaired by ORG's e-voting co-ordinator Jason Kitcat, discussed the film's implications particularly given e-voting pilots planned in the UK for May 2007. On the panel were John Pugh MP (Liberal Democrat); Russell Michaels, one of the film's co-directors and Dr Rebecca Mercuri, an e-voting expert from the United States.

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The voting computers used to cast 90% of the votes in Netherlands were cracked by a Dutch Group called "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet" (We do not trust voting computers).

In a live public show on 4 October 2006 on the Dutch television channel Nederland 1, the group proved how the control program of such a voting machine - called Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B - could be replaced by exchanging 2 EPROMS on the board. The entire demonstration lasted less than 5 minutes.

The demonstration was followed by a public report released on 6 October that explains how the program works, how the software was created and how they can gain complete control over the election results. It is almost impossible

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France has tried to implement an Internet voting system that should have allowed French citizens living abroad to vote during the presidential elections in 2007. However, the system has been criticized and has not been proven to be reliable.

The French living abroad are represented by the AFE (Assemblée des Français de l'Étranger), a consultative body which elects 12 senators (out of 331). Half of the AFE was replaced in June 2006. Votes could be cast either in embassies (in a traditional way), by regular mail or Internet.

In 2003, Internet voting had been used for the first time and it was then restricted to voters living in the USA. This time, all the 525 000 voters