German activists move to block e-voting
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Claiming that their government simply doesn't have the knowledge to do it right, Germany's venerable Chaos Computer Club has called for an injunction barring their government from deploying e-voting machines in an election slated for late January.
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With less than six weeks to go before the Nov. 2 presidential election, voting activists said officials still have time to set up a paper trail as a counterweight to an e-voting system they portrayed as wide open to manipulation.
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Voting started in two western German states on Sunday in elections widely seen as a test for Chancellor Angela Merkel and her conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) before next year's federal vote.
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As the voting gets underway, in what is expected to be a tight race, there are already election fears of fraud. Many are worried that the PSD (Social Democrats) might attempt to manipulate the voting in some way.
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A team of e-voting researchers has released a report describing flaw in the e-voting machines used by 90 percent of Dutch voters. The report describes certain access problems as "strikingly similar" to those noted in Diebold's touch-screen voting machines last month.
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By Matt Moore  FRANKFURT, Germany - Some European countries are proposing outlawing the use of fake information to open e-mail accounts or set up Web sites, a move intended to help terrorism investigations but which could face resistance on a privacy-conscious continent.
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The net and video games are becoming essential tools for political activists.
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More weaknesses appear in the Diebold electronic voting system that activists say could be used to rig the November election. The company says auditing procedures would catch any vote fraud. By Kim Zetter.
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A proposal before the German government to require ISPs and e-mail service providers to collect and retain a significant amount of customer data has drawn Google's ire. The company says it may shut down the German version of its Gmail service if the law goes through.
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BERLIN : Voting got off to a slow start in a traditional stronghold of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats (SPD) which faced its last test at the ballot box this year.
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(InfoWorld) - GoogleÂ is unhappy with proposed German legislation to ban anonymous e-mail accounts and may consider dropping the German version of its Gmail service. "This whole initiative is a bad idea," a spokesman for Google in Germany said Monday. The draft bill would require ISPs (Internet service providers) and providers of e-mail service to collect and store customer data that security officials could access if necessary. In an interview with the German weekly business magazine Wirtschaftswoche, Google's Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer was quoted saying that if the German government passes its proposed Internet surveillance legislation into law, "if need be, we will switch off Google Mail in Germany." Fleischer could not be reached and the Google spokesman declined to comment on Fleischer's statement about possibly switching off Gmail in Germany. In the interview, Fleischer urged the German government to drop its plans and warned that a German scheme to monitor e-mail was pointless, given that users could easily turn to foreign e-mail addresses.
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A politically progressive website at the forefront of discussions about electronic-voting machines and election irregularities is barring Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris from posting to its site. By Joanna Glasner.
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Increasing attacks against participants in the upcoming election are silencing campaigns and leaving voters in the dark.
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Parties on the fringes of Germany's political spectrum have been given an eager reception in the depressed east ahead of state elections this weekend, luring voters with a mix of xenophobic standards and new complaints over plans to reduce much-needed benefits.
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Opposition, abstentions emerge as the international standards group counts votes on Office Open XML.
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Saudi pro-reform activists say they are seeking signatures online to back their campaign for free elections.
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(InfoWorld) - A coalition of voting rights groups on Monday called on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would require electronic voting machines to have printers attached as a way to audit the touch-screen results. But the lack of a paper trail for many e-voting machines was only one problem among many during the 2006 U.S. elections, said speakers at the Elections: Looking Forward conference, sponsored by Common Cause, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and other groups. Many of the problems attributed to e-voting machines were caused by a lack of training for poll workers or administrative mistakes, said Efrain Escobedo, director of voter engagement at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. Poll workers observed by his group didn't know how to change the paper in machines with paper trails or didn't know how to reboot machines, he said. Participants in the event also described several other problems not related to e-voting: poll workers demanding photo identification when it wasn't required by law, polling places lacking voting materials in languages other than English, polling places inaccessible to disabled people, and long lines. But several speakers called on Congress to pass the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, which would require paper trail printouts with touch-screen e-voting machines. Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, introduced the bill Feb. 5, after a similar piece of legislation failed to pass during the 2005-06 congressional session. The Holt bill has 183 cosponsors, close to half of the House of Representatives. Congress needs to act in the next six to eight months for the legislation to affect the 2008 elections, said Ralph Neas, president and chief executive officer of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group. Neas pointed to the 2006 vote in Sarasota Country, Florida, where e-voting machines did not record a vote from more than 18,000 people in a congressional race decided by less than 400 votes. "Sarasota was a disgrace," Neas said. "Eighteen thousand votes ... inexplicably disappeared into cyberspace. But it's a teachable moment. We've got 18,000 faces now that we can put on the problem." Not all speakers agreed that Congress should move ahead immediately with paper trails. Many visually impaired voters were able to vote without assistance on touch-screen machines for the first time in 2006, said Christina Galindo-Walsh, senior staff attorney with the National Disability Rights Network. Paper trail printouts would again create a two-tier voting system in which some disabled people don't have access to the same information as other voters, she said. Galindo-Walsh and Jim Dickson, vice president for government affairs at the American Association of People with Disabilities, also said it was too late for Congress to mandate paper trail ballots by the 2008 presidential election. E-voting machine vendors wouldn't be able to produce enough printers by 2008, Galindo-Walsh said. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed in 2002, mandated standards for voting machines, and those standards are just being completed now, Dickson added. Those standards still need to be tested, and new machines meeting those standards need to be built, he said. "Either you lower the standards for the election equipment, or you live with the timeline that looks like 2010," he said. "You cannot have it both ways." But many voters now question e-voting systems, added Melanie Campbell, executive director and CEO of the Coalition for Black Civic Participation. "The reality is voters are losing confidence in the system," she said.