Online voting for disabled voters

Since the 1992 General Election, disability charity Scope has run a campaign called Polls Apart, which aims to make elections more accessible to disabled voters. After voting at each General Election, disabled people are asked to complete a survey about the accessibility of their voting experience.

The Polls Apart campaign 2010 surveyed over 1,000 disabled people in constituencies throughout the UK. Researchers found that 67 per cent of polling stations had one or more significant access barriers to disabled voters. This represents just a 1 per cent improvement from the last General Election (68 per cent) and 2 per cent from the General Election of 2001 (69 per cent).

This meant that in 2010, many disabled people needed assistance to vote, and could not vote in the privacy of polling booths like other voters. Some disabled people were unable to vote at all.

Despite the widespread assumption that postal voting was the most accessible channel for disabled voters, almost half (47 per cent) of postal voters reported one or more significant problems. These ranged from the confusing and complicated instructions that accompanied the ballot to the difficulty postal voters faced in marking and folding and the paper into the small envelope provided.

One long-term solution being suggested by Scope is the introduction of online voting for disabled voters. Thirty five per cent of the disabled people surveyed in 2010 said they would like to be able to vote online.

Scope’s Ruth Scott told the BBC she supports online voting:

“In a digital age where people can vote by text for the X-Factor and shop and bank online, our voting system really needs to catch up.”

Online voting would certainly allow more disabled people to cast their votes independently and in safety, comfort and privacy.

This would also benefit non-disabled voters, and politics as a whole, as it would shorten the entire voting process. This may encourage more people to vote, particularly young, first time voters.

It is now to be hoped that the Scope report will be read by all politicians, and that serious thought will be given to allowing the option of online voting for everyone.

http://twitter.com/lockpickernet/status/16861779924 LockPickerNet

Online voting for disabled voters http://bit.ly/bt1fnb via @leftfootfwd
http://bestblogs.labourhome.org/2010/06/23/online-voting-for-disabled-voters/ Online voting for disabled voters « The best Labour blogs

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SadButMadLad

There is a difference between voting on X-Factor where there is not much fraud and the result doesn’t affect millions of people and voting in an election where fraud is extremely important to avoid. In the former there is no need for any validation and it’s more important for ITV to make money from the phone in. In the later it is extremely important to verify every vote and it’s more important to ensure that the government is elected with a proper mandate.

Security is pretty good even now with on-line banking, but it can still be bypassed. However security is more than just making sure the bits aren’t intercepted as they travel from the elector to the government. It’s also making sure that the vote belongs to the person making it and no one else. It’s also making sure that the vote is recorded properly and that it hasn’t been adjusted afterwards. That’s why postal votes aren’t a very good method. It’s also why electronic voting machines are suspect unless they can keep a full and proper paper record and prove that all votes are correct and haven’t been adjusted afterwards and that the software has not been tampered with.

To make voting accessible to the disabled it doesn’t need high tech. Just good old fashioned low tech and a slight change in the law. If someone can’t get in to the voting booths, the staff should be allowed to bring the box out. If someone needs help writing out their ballot form then this is already possible via proxies. Sometimes the disabled do need someone to do something for them.
http://twitter.com/superpaddy1601/status/16877302459 Edward Leathem

RT @leftfootfwd: Online voting for disabled voters http://bit.ly/bt1fnb
mike

they can vote while the tories and lib dems cut their benefits
http://refusingthedefault.blogspot.com/ cim

“If someone can’t get in to the voting booths, the staff should be allowed to bring the box out.”

This is already done on occasion, and it’s a very bad substitute, especially if it’s raining. People with disabilities should have the right to the same private and secure vote as everyone else. There are people who will need an assistant to help them vote even in an ideal set up, yes, but nowhere near as many as required by the current level of inaccessibility (and as the report makes clear, it’s not as if the treatment of people who do need assistants is at a good stage yet).

If you read the report it’s clearly more than just a matter of a few minor adjustments needing making, and the provision of a range of different voting methods adds to the ability of people to vote securely and privately.

Electronic (which doesn’t necessarily mean internet) voting in elections would be quite a bit harder than the X-Factor, sure, but I don’t think it’s necessarily harder than banks, who have taken a range of steps to reduce fraud in telephone and internet banking. Remember that outside Northern Ireland, you need no identification to walk into a polling station, claim to be a registered person, and cast their vote, so it’s not as if ballot box voting is immune to fraud, not to mention the various problems with household-level registration.
http://www.MarkPack.org.uk Mark Pack

Cim: the big different between electronic voting and banking is that in banking you know what money should be going in and out and so can check. Surprised at the balance on your statement? You can go through the list of transactions to see if a cheque was lost, direct debit taken twice by mistake etc. And mistakes do happen – which banks can then correct.

With voting (or more precisely, with secret voting) there isn’t the same ability to check because no-one knows how individuals had meant to vote. Without knowing what the correct sequence of transactions should have been you can’t correct errors in the same way as banks can and do.

That makes electronic voting a much harder and riskier process than banking.

I think the last line of the post rather misses the point – a lot of serious thought has been given to electronic voting (and a fair amount of money spent on plenty of pilots in the UK) and the conclusions are far from positive: it’s often popular with the public, but it is very costly, quite often ran into serious problems and left many security experts unconvinced.

It’s not that serious thought hasn’t been given to the issue; it has not only been thought about, it has been tested – and the results are very different from the simple ‘it’s good’ mantra.
http://www.samedifference1.com sarah

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your comments- very useful. I didn’t realise this possibility had been thought about before. What the last line means is then that I hope that after reading the report, politicians can consider it again.
http://refusingthedefault.blogspot.com/ cim

Mark: Indeed – the Scope report makes various references to the 2002/3 pilots of e-voting. I used to be quite sceptical about it as well, and I agree we’re not ready for it yet, but I think in the medium-long term (which is when Scope are talking about) the difficulties could be overcome.

There are various ways to provide checks that votes cast electronically are both recorded correctly and then counted, though, that do not breach the secrecy of the vote. It’s also worth noting, if you look at some of the Scope report regarding voters with (e.g.) visual impairments, or this voter’s account that our current paper-based system provides no guarantees that votes will be recorded or counted correctly.
http://www.MarkPack.org.uk Mark Pack

Sarah: fair enough

Cim: Here’s an example of what can go wrong: a voting system gets wrongly configured so that votes for candidate A are recorded as votes for candidate B and vice-versa. The banking equivalent (direct debit or standing order takes money from wrong place) can be spotted (“why’s that money gone from my account?”) in a way that voting secrecy prevents for elections. Of course there should be good procedures etc. to stop this type of error, but procedures go wrong and voting secrecy means there’s less opportunity to spot such errors. Paper-based voting isn’t perfect but it doesn’t have this (extra) risk.
http://refusingthedefault.blogspot.com/ cim

If the voting system can be wrongly configured to do that, without the voter noticing, it’s not fit for purpose. I would want a lot of safeguards and independent scrutiny of the integrity of e-voting systems and software, obviously. Ideally, I think the source code of any e-voting software should be open for public inspection.

Certainly e-voting can be set up in a way that does not have those safeguards, and the USA has been doing so for some time, but this is not an inevitability.

I’ve written online voting software, and while there are definitely difficult problems to solve regarding identifying and authenticating voters (and it’s these that have made me very sceptical about e-voting in the past, and that I don’t think we’ll really be in a position to solve properly for another decade or so), it is really not that difficult to record a vote correctly, confirm to the voter that the vote has been recorded correctly, and provide a mechanism by which they can confirm that this vote was included in the count.
Mr. Sensible

I support this in principle, and indeed I think calls for this across the board have intencified following the situations that occured at some Polling Stations during the election.

Nevertheless, I think the points raised in the comments here are valid and should be looked at carefully. #
http://twitter.com/janewatkinson/status/17036998492 Jane Watkinson

RT @leftfootfwd: Online voting for disabled voters http://bit.ly/bt1fnb