Voter ID

The question of whether voters should be required to present an acceptable form of identification (ID) when casting a ballot at a federal election has persisted. Executive summary The question of whether voters should be required to present an acceptable form of identification (ID) when casting a ballot at a federal election has persisted, notwithstanding quite exhaustive debate and deliberation in numerous forums. Arguments advanced in favour of requiring voter ID included the need to: protect the integrity of the information contained on the roll deter attempts by voters to impersonate another voter discourage attempts by a voter to vote more than once. In 2001, in its report User friendly, not abuser friendly: Report of the inquiry into the integrity of the electoral roll, the Joint Standing Committee of Electoral Matters (JSCEM) concluded that that the introduction of voter identification was not warranted as a measure to deter fraud But while some consider that the level of alleged electoral fraud is minuscule, others have a much more pessimistic view. The report of the JSCEM Inquiry into the conduct of the 2001 Federal election addressed proof-of-identity requirements, but focussed on initial enrolment or re-enrolment, not the requirement to produce ID in the normal course of casting a ballot at a polling booth. The Committee recommended ‘that people making a first-time enrolment, those seeking re-enrolment, and those transferring their enrolment details, first be required to provide proof of identity and address, via a driver’s licence or similar. But evidence to that same JSCEM inquiry highlighted problems with the ready availability of ID among people who are extremely disadvantaged or living in Indigenous communities. Others argued that the alleged difficulties of producing ID are over stated, citing the numbers that attend large sports clubs or present ID to access video stores. Australians have a history of resistance to the adoption of any kind of universal ID card that can be legally required to be shown in order to access government services or to confirm one’s identity. The arguments against such a card are broadly couched in terms of personal privacy and an aversion to a ‘surveillance state’

Casting votes digitally: examining the Latvian national position on Internet voting

The following dissertation aims to examine the Latvian national position on Internet voting through the prism of governmental and non-governmental actors’ perspectives. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of the i-voting pre-conditions outlined in Kotka’s et al. analysis (2015) as well as the Estonian National Electoral Committee’s report E-System Overview (2005), the dissertation adopts the content analysis method to identify the main underpinnings of the governmental and non-governmental actors’ position on the issue as well as the factors that shape the national discourse. Through examination of 34 documents of the relevant actors issued in the period between February 2012 and December 2015, the dissertation proposes a framework of determining the national position by estimating and comparing the indexes of average connotations (IAC) for governmental and non-governmental actors. Relying on empirical findings emerging from the coding scheme framework, the study argues that the national position is influenced by concerns over trust and security factors and suffers from a high degree of incoherence due to discrepancies and mismatches in the governmental and non-governmental actors’ ways of forming their judgments in regard to the vital i-voting pre-conditions. Taking into account that there are currently no studies that analyse in-depth the i-voting situation in Latvia, the following dissertation brings both academic and policy-oriented contributions by laying out a new theoretical approach of looking at the issue of i-voting through the lens of the pre-conditions and their impact on forming the national position as well as providing recommendations on the future direction and prospects of the i-voting strategy in Latvia. Moreover, the study puts forward a model that could be tested and applied further in other EU Member States to verify the state of the development and readiness of the i-voting pre-conditions.http://www.ester.ee/record=b4578751*es

The liberty of the post-moderns? Market and civic freedom within the EU

Taking its cue from Benjamin's Constant's famous essay, this article uses the case of EU citizenship to explore how far ancient, civic, freedom can be combined with modern, market, freedom. Many commentators have, in different ways, argued that the forces promoting European integration call for a new form of post-national citizenship that either builds civic freedom on the basis of the liberties of the moderns or does away with the need for it altogether. These arguments are disputed. Constant perceptively raised a number of problems with this analysis, while ignoring - or being ignorant of - a number of others. As he noted, ancient liberty corrects various pathologies and lacunas of modern liberty, but he overlooked the degree to which its survival rested on the continuing importance of certain pre-modern forms of social solidarity in modern times. Those seeking new forms of post-modern citizenship tend to ignore one or other or both these points. The piece concludes by arguing that the only practical way of combining ancient and modern liberty within the EU is to view it as a particularly intense form of international cooperation between democratic states rather than as a supranational organisation that transcends its component parts

ELECTRONIC VOTING AS AN INSTRUMENT FOR FREE, FAIR AND CREDIBLE ELECTIONS IN NIGERIAN POLITICAL SYSTEM: ISSUES AND CHALLENGES

Electoral management is one of the recurrent discussions in emerging democracies across the globe. Issues of electoral fraud are most times predicated on the nature of electoral management since most elections in the affected countries are done manually. Improving on the electoral management has therefore become a focus of concern that the Nigerian state also aligned itself with in order to better its course of the democratic enterprise. Automation of electoral processes from the manual practice is primarily to address noticeable negativities associated with the manual system. This paper is an explanatory one that seeks to analyze the incentives, setbacks and challenges of the electronic voting system. The paper utilized secondary sources through careful analysis of literature on the subject matter in addition to personal observations and discussions among intellectual colleagues. The incentives of E-voting include but are not limited to reduction of electoral fraud, delays, manipulations of results and other irregularities including cost. The paper also maintains that the e-voting system has its own drawbacks in the forms of IT logistics, infrastructure, lack of trust, issues of transparency among other challenges. It concludes that there should be a pilot test at the micro level for an experiment before adopting on a large-scale national election, networking of government agencies to be fully IT compliant, inter alia.  Article visualizations

Seventh International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting

This volume contains papers presented at E-Vote-ID 2022, the Seventh International JointConference on Electronic Voting, held during October 4–7, 2022. This was the first in-personconference following the COVID-19 pandemic, and, as such, it was a very special event forthe community since we returned to the traditional venue in Bregenz, Austria. The E-Vote-IDconference resulted from merging EVOTE and Vote-ID, and 18 years have now elapsed sincethe first EVOTE conference in Austria.Since that conference in 2004, over 1500 experts have attended the venue, including scholars,practitioners, authorities, electoral managers, vendors, and PhD students. E-Vote-ID collectsthe most relevant debates on the development of electronic voting, from aspects relating tosecurity and usability through to practical experiences and applications of voting systems, alsoincluding legal, social, or political aspects, amongst others, turning out to be an importantglobal referent on these issues