Fabrizio mi segnala questo interessante articolo sulla storia del voto elettronico in Olanda: primo paese ad adottarlo e poi (probabilmente primo) ad abbandonarlo. Vale la pena di leggerlo tutto, ma cito i passaggi più interessanti:
The belief in ICT and technology as the ultimate solution to existing problems has led many governments to embrace it and make it a top priority for modernization (progress ideology). This shows that the instigators of e-government often have a utopian deterministic view. Secondly, the technophilia of developers plays an important role. This “myth of the technological fix” believes that better technology, and more of it, will solve any practical problem. Technology development becomes an end in itself.
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On October 1, 2007, the District Court of Amsterdam decertified all Nedap voting computers. This court order was the result of an administrative law procedure started by Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet in March 2007. In May 2008, the Dutch government decided that elections in the Netherlands would from that point be conducted using paper ballots and red pencil only. They rejected a proposal by several members of parliament that a new generation of voting computers be developed.
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High levels of outsourcing can impede the development of state capacity, which can lead to an uneven relationship between powerful IT and consultancy companies and comparatively less powerful and less competent governments. In the case of e-voting in the Netherlands, it became clear that the government did not have sufficient expertise about electronic voting to lay down appropriate legal requirements, and as a consequence adopted a highly laissez-faire model. Although investigations by the activists found that the voting computers used were insufficiently secure, the Nedap machines did comply with all Dutch regulatory requirements.
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When the Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet activists filed an FOIA request in which they requested access to the full test reports, the director of TNO objected to publication of the documents in a letter to the Ministry of the Interior: “They [the documents] contain personnel confidential information, among other things the names of our employees and company secrets (about our practices, intellectual property, etc.).” Furthermore: “Also in our contracts with Nedap it has been explicitly indicated that no publication will take place. The TNO reports have not been written, each in itself at any time, to inform any person. This would require a different way of reporting.” The fact that the Ministry only had a small fraction of the reports from the TNO certification institute is an indication that the government no longer viewed elections as their “core business.” Even understanding how the elections worked was completely in the hands of the private sector.
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On April 15, 2005 the Dutch Electoral Council sent a letter to Minister Pechtold, bringing up this issue of dependency. The Electoral Council seemed to regret that the software was not Open Source: “The manufacturers supply updates to the software before each election […]. So for elections to proceed the municipalities depend on these manufacturers. The Electoral Council would like to point out that neither the source code to the software inside the voting computers nor the source code to the software that adds up the totals is in the public domain.”
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When the Electoral Council informed the vendor that it would like to deposit a copy of the source code of the software with a so-called “escrow organization” for safe keeping, the vendor demanded a 100 million euro guarantee from the Electoral Council in the case of anything happening to the source code for which the escrow organization could not be held responsible.
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Looking at the FOIA documents about the SDU NewVote system, we see that the elections had truly been outsourced. The local council did not control anything
between the voting computer and the election results: not only were the computers supplied by SDU, but the entire process was managed by SDU.
Plans for the future revealed that all programs that count and total the votes would run on computers at SDU premises, and that election officials would only receive the results at the end of the day.
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Not long after the debate about the security and transparency of e-voting computers in the Netherlands started, it turned out that the fears of being too dependent on a private supplier of election software were not unfounded. Once the e-voting vendor started to feel that his business was in jeopardy, he wrote to election officials in the lead up to the national elections in November 2006, threatening to cease “cooperation” if the government did not accede to his requests. This correspondence became public after FOIA request #11 to the Electoral Council by the Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet campaign. The documents show that the vendor was more or less blackmailing the Dutch government. On November 10, 2006, an email was sent by the e-voting supplier warning the Ministry that they would cease all activity if one of the leading figures of the campaign (and a computer expert) became a member of the external Election Process Advisory Commission which was to investigate the future of the electoral process.
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In other words, the most sacred process in any democracy, vote counting, had been completely outsourced. This means there was no system of checks and balances anymore, and the election results were based on blind trust in commercial companies. This is not in compliance with the idea of transparent, open, and democratic elections.
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To make electronic voting more transparent for election officials, politicians, and citizens, the Dutch government should move from market contracts back to in-house delivery, use open source software, involve independent experts to determine requirements and test the hard and software, set clear criteria for evaluating performance, and promote public engagement in the service delivery process.
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When efficiency dominates—as is the case with outsourcing important aspects of public sector roles—it clashes with accountability and undermines democratic values (Verkuil 2007). This can have a negative consequence on the confidence of citizens in the election process and government in general. Therefore governments need to retain control, competency, and full responsibility over such a fundamental public service as elections, by retaining the main IT activities in-house.
