A story in The Sidney Morning Herald on e-voting

September 21, 2007

There is a story on e-voting in The Sidney Morning Herald. I have a few little quotes there in the beginning and end.

I’d especially like to underline the end quote where I talk about trust. I believe that it’s the same for e-voting and regular paper ballots. The risks in these systems are different, but when you aggregate them, I don’t believe that the risks of e-voting make it inherently more costly to society – there are both risks and benefits and they offset each other. A few high-provile “electronic voting” systems (I put it in quotes because I can’t see the point of having just machines in stations, it doesn’t make things much simpler for the user… true electronic voting is online voting) have been badly engineered in the US and have been heavily criticized by experts, and rightly so. But these cases have also tainted the debate and put suspicions towards systems that are built differently and might not be so bad. It will take a lot of effort, good engineering and even better marketing to clean up this mess and make people feel comfortable with e-voting, similarly as they feel comfortable with doing many other things online.